Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, the author's last foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to security along a swollen river as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which appears somehow to be the source of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from that area. The oil is viewed by various factions as a marketable good, by others as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply connected with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her fate are shown to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the world. Her private quest to reconnect with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the central struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to suppress independence of thinking, creativity and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the finding of a set of strange openings in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that seem to give on to other worlds. One such opening seems to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with its leader at its leadership, labels these openings as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to instinct, however, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic conflict between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
