Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second 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. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound power to broaden the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to the city to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial good, by others as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the original series, Lyra's choices and her fate are revealed to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the world. Her personal quest to reunite with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a broader war with an controlling system which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to stifle freedom of thinking, creativity and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story starts with the finding of a collection of curious cracks in the fabric of the planet's air: windows that appear to open into other worlds. One such opening appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid reason and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic conflict between purity and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
