Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are caught and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound influence to extend the religion's control. A key character, who rescued baby Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from that area. The extract is seen by some as a tradeable product, by others as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the original series, the protagonist's actions and her path are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the future of the universe. Her individual journey to reunite with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the central battleground in a larger conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to stifle freedom of reason, creativity and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the unveiling of a set of curious fissures in the makeup of the world's air: windows that look to lead to alternate realities. One such window seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its leadership, designates these windows as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid reason and back to feeling, however, her belief that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way vital – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean conflict between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
