Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle 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 continues where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in beast form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and drinks is consumed, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and persistent main character of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of austere, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the institution's control. Another protagonist, who rescued baby Lyra to security along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from the region. The extract is seen by certain groups as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm. Her individual quest to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a wider battle with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to stifle independence of reason, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the finding of a set of unusual cracks in the makeup of the Earth's sky: gateways that appear to open into other worlds. One such window appears to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict logic and return to intuition, however, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between innocence and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
