Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and tea is drunk, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to depart in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound power to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which seems somehow to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from the region. The extract is seen by various factions as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the original series, her movements and her fate are revealed to be deeply woven with the future of the realm. Her personal quest to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the central struggle in a wider battle with an oppressive government which, as these systems always have, is attempting to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the finding of a series of curious openings in the fabric of the Earth's air: windows that look to lead to alternate realities. A particular window appears to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these openings as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict rationalism and back to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is somehow crucial – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic struggle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
