Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and tea is sipped, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified 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.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to broaden the church's control. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from that area. The substance is seen by certain groups as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably connected with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe. Her personal quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a broader battle with an controlling government which, as these systems always have, is attempting to suppress freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the discovery of a set of curious cracks in the makeup of the world's sky: windows that appear to lead to other worlds. A particular portal appears to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, classifies these windows as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from strict logic and return to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow essential – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic struggle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
