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Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are faltering and giving way."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in animal form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are taken and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby 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 determined protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

His choice to depart in quest of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh influence to extend the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which manifests in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from the region. The oil is regarded by various factions as a commercial product, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.

Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the realm

In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's movements and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world. Her personal mission to reunite with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a broader battle with an oppressive government which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to suppress independence of thought, originality and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The story opens with the unveiling of a set of unusual cracks in the structure of the world's air: windows that appear to lead to alternate realities. An example of a portal seems to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its helm, labels these openings as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and return to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is somehow essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic tussle between purity and knowledge is set.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the