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Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are faltering and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey

Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and determined main character of the earlier books, but older, sadder, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the church's dominium. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to learn more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which appears somehow to be the source of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by some as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe

In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her fate are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her individual quest to reunite with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a wider battle with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to quell autonomy of thought, innovation and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.

Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles

The book begins with the unveiling of a series of curious fissures in the makeup of the Earth's air: windows that appear to lead to other worlds. An example of a window manifests to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, designates these openings as a threat to the church's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow vital – increases. "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 scene for a Blakean conflict between innocence and maturity is established.

Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth

At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the