Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's last foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first introduced three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the skies are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but below, transports are taken and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in search of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his newfound authority to broaden the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried baby the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the original series, her choices and her fate are unveiled to be deeply woven with the fate of the universe. Her personal quest to reunite with her companion and regain her vision becomes the key struggle in a larger war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to suppress freedom of thought, originality and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the unveiling of a collection of strange openings in the structure of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to give on to alternate realities. One such portal seems to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a challenge to the church's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict reason and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic conflict between purity and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
