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Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are faltering and giving way."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to extend the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who carried infant the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about his aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The substance is viewed by various factions as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.

Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe

In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, her movements and her fate are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm. Her individual quest to reconnect with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a broader battle with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems always have, is attempting to suppress freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.

Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts

The novel begins with the unveiling of a series of unusual openings in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: portals that appear to open into alternate realities. A particular portal appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these openings as a threat to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict logic and return to intuition, however, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and their value is mysteriously essential – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between naivety and experience is prepared.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the