Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, transports are caught and beverages is drunk, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and determined main character of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more careful, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of strict, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his fresh influence to expand the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by certain groups as a commercial product, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the first trilogy, her movements and her destiny are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the world. Her private journey to reunite with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a broader war with an oppressive system which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thought, innovation and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the unveiling of a series of strange openings in the fabric of the world's air: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. An example of a opening seems to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these windows as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid rationalism and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously vital – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
