Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, transports are taken and tea is consumed, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh power to expand the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to the city to find out more about his aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from that area. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable good, by different parties as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply connected with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her actions and her fate are revealed to be deeply woven with the destiny of the realm. Her personal quest to reunite with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the key conflict in a broader war with an oppressive government which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to suppress freedom of reason, creativity and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story starts with the discovery of a series of unusual cracks in the fabric of the planet's air: gateways that appear to lead to other worlds. An example of a opening seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, labels these openings as a threat to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between purity and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
