Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and drinks is consumed, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound power to broaden the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which seems in some way to be the source of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a marketable product, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her fate are revealed to be deeply woven with the future of the realm. Her individual journey to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the key battleground in a broader war with an controlling regime which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress independence of thought, creativity and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the finding of a series of unusual openings in the structure of the Earth's air: portals that look to give on to other worlds. An example of a opening seems to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, designates these openings as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid reason and back to intuition, yet, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical struggle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the