Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are taken and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and persistent main character of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to expand the religion's control. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her individual journey to reunite with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a wider conflict with an oppressive system which, as these systems always have, is attempting to suppress autonomy of reason, originality and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the unveiling of a collection of unusual openings in the structure of the planet's air: gateways that appear to give on to other worlds. An example of a window manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its head, labels these portals as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible logic and return to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between naivety and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
