Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but below, vehicles are caught and drinks is sipped, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, warier, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound power to broaden the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the original series, her movements and her path are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her private quest to reunite with her companion and regain her vision becomes the key battleground in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thought, creativity and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the discovery of a series of curious openings in the structure of the Earth's air: portals that look to lead to alternate realities. One such window appears to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible logic and back to instinct, yet, her belief that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously vital – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic tussle between purity and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
