Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in animal form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more careful, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the institution's control. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and financial crisis rippling out from that area. The extract is seen by certain groups as a tradeable good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her path are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her personal quest to reunite with her companion and recover her vision becomes the central battleground in a broader battle with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to quell freedom of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The book starts with the unveiling of a collection of unusual openings in the structure of the planet's sky: portals that look to give on to other worlds. An example of a window manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid reason and back to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
