Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are taken and tea is sipped, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but older, sadder, warier, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to expand the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a marketable good, by others as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her fate are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the future of the realm. Her individual quest to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a broader battle with an oppressive system which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to stifle independence of thinking, innovation and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the finding of a set of strange openings in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: windows that look to lead to other worlds. One such window appears to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its helm, labels these portals as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and revert to instinct, yet, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
