Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but below, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged 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 The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and determined heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound influence to expand the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from that area. The extract is seen by various factions as a commercial product, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the original series, her actions and her fate are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world. Her individual mission to reunite with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a larger battle with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to stifle autonomy of reason, originality and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the discovery of a collection of strange fissures in the fabric of the Earth's sky: gateways that look to give on to alternate realities. One such opening appears to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, designates these windows as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid reason and back to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their significance and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
