Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's last foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met 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 Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the religion's rule. A key character, who rescued baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the original series, the protagonist's actions and her fate are revealed to be deeply woven with the fate of the world. Her individual quest to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress freedom of thought, innovation and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a set of unusual openings in the structure of the planet's air: windows that look to open into other worlds. A particular portal seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, designates these openings as a threat to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible logic and revert to instinct, however, her belief that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way crucial – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
