Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the air are filled with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are taken and drinks is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more careful, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his newfound power to expand the institution's rule. A key character, who carried young the heroine to security along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from that area. The oil is viewed by various factions as a commercial product, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the first trilogy, her movements and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm. Her personal mission to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a wider war with an controlling regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to quell freedom of reason, creativity and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book begins with the finding of a series of strange cracks in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: gateways that look to lead to different dimensions. One such portal appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its helm, labels these portals as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible logic and return to feeling, yet, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is in some way vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between innocence and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
