Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the skies are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and drinks is sipped, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and determined main character of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's rule. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The oil is viewed by some as a marketable good, by others as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's actions and her fate are shown to be deeply woven with the future of the world. Her personal journey to reunite with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a broader battle with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to suppress freedom of reason, originality and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the discovery of a collection of unusual openings in the makeup of the planet's sky: gateways that look to give on to alternate realities. A particular portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its head, classifies these windows as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, however, her belief that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is somehow vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical conflict between naivety and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
