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Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are weakening and failing."

Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path

Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in beast form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

His choice to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The oil is viewed by some as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.

Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her path are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world. Her personal journey to reunite with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the key struggle in a wider conflict with an authoritarian government which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to stifle autonomy of reason, creativity and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles

The novel opens with the discovery of a series of curious openings in the structure of the world's sky: portals that look to lead to different dimensions. One such window seems to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its helm, labels these portals as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid rationalism and back to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between purity and maturity is prepared.

Narrative Pacing and Character Development

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