Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, buses are taken and tea is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and persistent main character of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more careful, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound influence to extend the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from the region. The oil is regarded by various factions as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to the original series, Lyra's movements and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the fate of the world. Her individual mission to reconnect with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a wider war with an oppressive system which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to quell autonomy of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the unveiling of a collection of unusual openings in the fabric of the Earth's sky: gateways that look to open into different dimensions. A particular window appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, designates these windows as a threat to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid reason and return to instinct, however, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their meaning and their value is somehow vital – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic tussle between purity and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
