Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are ridden and tea is drunk, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to expand the religion's dominium. A key character, who carried young the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to find out more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from that area. The substance is viewed by various factions as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the original series, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply linked with the destiny of the universe. Her private journey to reunite with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a wider war with an oppressive system which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to quell autonomy of reason, innovation and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the finding of a set of unusual openings in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. One such opening seems to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, labels these windows as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible reason and revert to feeling, yet, her belief that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow vital – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between naivety and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
