Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the air are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are caught and tea is sipped, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of strict, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the church's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from that area. The oil is seen by various factions as a commercial good, by others as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world. Her private mission to reunite with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a wider conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to stifle autonomy of reason, originality and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the discovery of a collection of unusual cracks in the structure of the planet's air: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid rationalism and return to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their significance and their value is mysteriously vital – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between naivety and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
