Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in creature form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and tea is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of strict, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound influence to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which appears in some way to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The oil is seen by certain groups as a commercial product, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the original series, her actions and her fate are unveiled to be deeply woven with the future of the realm. Her personal journey to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a wider war with an controlling government which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to stifle independence of reason, creativity and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the makeup of the planet's air: windows that appear to open into different dimensions. An example of a opening seems to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its head, designates these portals as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and return to instinct, however, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean struggle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
