Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in beast form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, warier, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh power to extend the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which appears somehow to be the origin of a social and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The oil is seen by some as a marketable good, by others as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her path are revealed to be inseparably woven with the fate of the universe. Her personal journey to reunite with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a larger conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thought, innovation and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the finding of a set of curious cracks in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that appear to give on to different dimensions. An example of a opening seems to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these openings as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid reason and revert to feeling, however, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their significance and their value is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
