Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the skies are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but below, buses are ridden and drinks is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, warier, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a marketable product, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply connected with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the original series, her movements and her fate are shown to be deeply woven with the destiny of the realm. Her private mission to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a wider battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities always have, is striving to stifle independence of thought, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the discovery of a set of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that seem to lead to other worlds. An example of a window manifests to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its helm, designates these portals as a problem to the church's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible reason and revert to instinct, however, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean struggle between naivety and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
