Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, transports are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to expand the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to find out more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from the region. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply connected with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her fate are shown to be deeply woven with the future of the universe. Her individual mission to reunite with her soul and recover her vision becomes the key conflict in a wider war with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to suppress independence of thinking, creativity and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the discovery of a series of curious cracks in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that look to lead to different dimensions. One such portal appears to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these windows as a problem to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible reason and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between purity and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
