Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the skies are populated with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and tea is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and determined heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh influence to broaden the institution's dominium. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which seems in some way to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from the region. The oil is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by others as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her path are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her private quest to reconnect with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a wider battle with an authoritarian government which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to quell autonomy of thought, creativity and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story starts with the unveiling of a series of unusual fissures in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that seem to lead to other worlds. One such opening appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these windows as a problem to the religion's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid reason and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical tussle between naivety and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
