Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates this final volume, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in beast form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are caught and drinks is sipped, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and determined heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, warier, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound authority to extend the church's control. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the first trilogy, her actions and her fate are shown to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her individual quest to reconnect with her companion and recover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a wider battle with an controlling government which, as these systems always have, is striving to stifle independence of thought, innovation and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the unveiling of a set of unusual openings in the structure of the world's atmosphere: gateways that appear to open into different dimensions. An example of a opening manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible reason and return to intuition, yet, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical conflict between purity and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
