Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in beast form; where the air are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but below, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, warier, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound influence to broaden the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to discover more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by some as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they converge. As in the original series, her movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her personal mission to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a wider conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the discovery of a set of curious fissures in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that look to lead to different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these windows as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid rationalism and revert to intuition, yet, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way vital – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic struggle between naivety and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
