Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in beast form; where the heavens are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and drinks is sipped, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound influence to expand the institution's control. A key character, who saved infant Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by various factions as a commercial good, by others as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the original series, Lyra's actions and her path are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm. Her private journey to reconnect with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a broader war with an oppressive system which, as these systems typically do, is striving to quell autonomy of thinking, originality and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the unveiling of a collection of unusual cracks in the structure of the planet's air: gateways that look to give on to other worlds. One such opening appears to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these windows as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict rationalism and return to intuition, yet, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between naivety and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
