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Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are faltering and giving way."

Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in beast form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and beverages is sipped, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and persistent main character of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, warier, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound authority to expand the church's control. Another protagonist, who saved young Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by others as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.

Similar to the first series, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe

In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, her actions and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her personal journey to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a larger battle with an controlling government which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to suppress independence of thinking, originality and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The book starts with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the structure of the world's air: gateways that appear to lead to different dimensions. One such window appears to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these windows as a problem to the institution's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid reason and return to intuition, yet, her belief that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between innocence and experience is established.

Plot Rhythm and Character Development

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