Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the skies are teeming with witches and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and beverages is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and persistent main character of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the religion's control. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to security along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to find out more about his plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by various factions as a marketable commodity, by others as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the first trilogy, her actions and her path are shown to be inseparably woven with the fate of the world. Her personal mission to reconnect with her companion and recover her vision becomes the central struggle in a larger battle with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle independence of thinking, innovation and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the unveiling of a set of curious fissures in the structure of the planet's air: gateways that appear to give on to different dimensions. An example of a portal seems to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible logic and return to intuition, however, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the