Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound authority to extend the institution's control. Another protagonist, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to find out more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from that area. The substance is viewed by some as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her destiny are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her individual mission to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a larger war with an oppressive government which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to stifle freedom of thinking, creativity and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the finding of a series of strange cracks in the structure of the world's atmosphere: portals that seem to lead to different dimensions. One such portal manifests to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these portals as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible logic and back to instinct, however, her belief that these sites must be protected – that their significance and their value is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between naivety and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
