Things are unraveling in the last installment 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 charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are caught and tea is consumed, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound power to broaden the institution's dominium. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the original series, her choices and her path are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the universe. Her private mission to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the central battleground in a wider war with an oppressive system which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to stifle autonomy of thinking, innovation and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the finding of a series of curious openings in the structure of the Earth's sky: gateways that appear to lead to other worlds. One such opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these openings as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible logic and revert to intuition, however, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their significance and their value is in some way crucial – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic tussle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
