Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and tea is sipped, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first 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 young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to expand the religion's rule. A key character, who saved infant Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by some as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the original series, Lyra's choices and her path are shown to be deeply woven with the fate of the universe. Her individual quest to reunite with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling government which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to suppress autonomy of reason, creativity and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the finding of a series of curious openings in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: gateways that seem to open into other worlds. An example of a portal appears to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its head, classifies these windows as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and revert to intuition, yet, her certainty that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic tussle between purity and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
