Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in creature form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and drinks is drunk, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, warier, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his newfound power to broaden the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried infant Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The oil is viewed by some as a marketable product, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably connected with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the original series, her actions and her path are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the future of the universe. Her individual quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a wider war with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities always have, is striving to stifle autonomy of thought, creativity and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story starts with the unveiling of a collection of curious fissures in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: gateways that look to give on to alternate realities. A particular portal appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these windows as a problem to the religion's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow vital – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
