Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but below, transports are taken and tea is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the church's rule. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by various factions as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her private mission to reconnect with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a broader battle with an controlling government which, as such authorities always have, is striving to suppress autonomy of thinking, creativity and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the unveiling of a series of unusual cracks in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: gateways that seem to lead to other worlds. One such opening appears to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible reason and revert to instinct, however, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean struggle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
