Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the air are filled with witches and gryphons, but below, buses are ridden and tea is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's dominium. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from the region. The substance is seen by some as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, her choices and her path are revealed to be deeply woven with the future of the world. Her personal quest to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a wider battle with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of reason, innovation and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book opens with the finding of a collection of unusual openings in the structure of the world's sky: gateways that look to lead to different dimensions. An example of a opening appears to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, designates these windows as a problem to the religion's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict reason and return to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
