Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but below, transports are taken and tea is drunk, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired power to expand the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which appears somehow to be the source of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from the region. The extract is seen by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the original series, her choices and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the world. Her private quest to rejoin with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the key conflict in a wider battle with an oppressive system which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thought, creativity and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the unveiling of a set of strange cracks in the structure of the Earth's air: gateways that look to lead to other worlds. A particular window appears to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, designates these portals as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict rationalism and revert to feeling, however, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way crucial – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic conflict between purity and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
