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Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are weakening and failing."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

Pan's decision to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh power to extend the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby the heroine to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to discover more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which appears in some way to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.

Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the fate of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably woven with the fate of the realm. Her private quest to rejoin with her companion and regain her vision becomes the primary conflict in a broader conflict with an controlling regime which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell autonomy of thinking, creativity and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The story starts with the discovery of a set of unusual fissures in the makeup of the world's air: windows that look to open into alternate realities. An example of a opening manifests to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its head, labels these portals as a problem to the institution's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible logic and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between innocence and maturity is prepared.

Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution

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