Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", 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 durable are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are ridden and beverages is consumed, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in quest of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound influence to broaden the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The substance is viewed by various factions as a tradeable product, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, her choices and her path are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe. Her individual mission to reunite with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a wider conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell independence of thought, creativity and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a collection of unusual fissures in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: gateways that look to lead to alternate realities. An example of a opening seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these windows as a threat to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid rationalism and return to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean struggle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
