Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in animal form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are ridden and beverages is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in quest of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to extend the church's control. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a commercial good, by others as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are revealed to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the world. Her private mission to reunite with her soul and regain her vision becomes the central struggle in a larger war with an authoritarian government which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to suppress independence of thinking, innovation and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the finding of a series of strange openings in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: portals that look to open into alternate realities. An example of a opening manifests to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its head, labels these openings as a problem to the institution's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid reason and return to instinct, yet, her belief that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical conflict between purity and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
