Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels this final volume, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in animal form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the church's governing body, and is set on using his newfound influence to expand the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from the region. The oil is seen by some as a commercial product, by others as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply connected with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are shown to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her private journey to rejoin with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a broader conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to stifle independence of thinking, originality and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the unveiling of a set of unusual cracks in the makeup of the Earth's sky: gateways that look to lead to different dimensions. An example of a portal seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its head, classifies these portals as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid reason and back to feeling, however, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is in some way essential – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical struggle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
