Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and tea is drunk, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound power to extend the religion's dominium. A key character, who saved baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about his aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The substance is regarded by some as a tradeable product, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her fate are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the universe. Her individual journey to reconnect with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the central struggle in a larger war with an oppressive government which, as these systems always have, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the finding of a set of unusual cracks in the structure of the planet's sky: windows that seem to lead to alternate realities. A particular window appears to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its helm, classifies these openings as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible reason and revert to feeling, however, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously vital – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical struggle between purity and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
