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Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and failing."

The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey

Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with witches and gryphons, but below, vehicles are ridden and beverages is consumed, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and determined main character of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more careful, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

His choice to go off in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to extend the church's control. A key character, who rescued baby Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, 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 underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The extract is viewed by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe

In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe. Her personal quest to reunite with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a wider battle with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles

The novel starts with the finding of a series of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's air: windows that appear to give on to alternate realities. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these windows as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid logic and revert to instinct, however, her belief that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between naivety and maturity is prepared.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

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