Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, the author's last foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are ridden and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby 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 earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of austere, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired power to extend the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to discover more about his plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by some as a commercial product, by different parties as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her path are shown to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her personal journey to rejoin with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a larger battle with an oppressive regime which, as these systems always have, is attempting to quell freedom of thought, creativity and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the unveiling of a set of unusual fissures in the structure of the planet's sky: windows that appear to lead to alternate realities. An example of a portal manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these openings as a problem to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid logic and back to instinct, yet, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic tussle between naivety and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
