Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the heavens are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are caught and tea is consumed, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and persistent main character of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound power to extend the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the original series, Lyra's actions and her fate are unveiled to be deeply woven with the destiny of the realm. Her individual journey to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the central conflict in a larger war with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thinking, creativity and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the finding of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the world's sky: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. A particular portal appears to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, labels these openings as a threat to the institution's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid logic and revert to instinct, however, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously vital – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between naivety and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
