Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are caught and tea is drunk, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in search of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to expand the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by others as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, its meaning, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the first trilogy, her actions and her destiny are shown to be inextricably woven with the future of the universe. Her private mission to reunite with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an oppressive regime which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to suppress freedom of thinking, creativity and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the finding of a set of unusual fissures in the structure of the planet's sky: portals that seem to give on to alternate realities. A particular portal manifests to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these openings as a threat to the institution's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict logic and revert to feeling, yet, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow crucial – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical struggle between purity and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
