Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the heavens are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and drinks is sipped, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to extend the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which appears somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The substance is viewed by some as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her actions and her fate are shown to be inseparably woven with the fate of the world. Her private journey to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a broader battle with an oppressive government which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to quell freedom of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story opens with the finding of a collection of unusual cracks in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that appear to open into other worlds. One such opening manifests to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict rationalism and back to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their significance and their value is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between naivety and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
