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Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are faltering and giving way."

The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey

Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and drinks is sipped, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered 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 recognisably the prickly and determined heroine of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to leave in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh authority to broaden the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from the region. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.

As in the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. As in the original series, her movements and her fate are revealed to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe. Her private mission to reunite with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a broader battle with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles

The book starts with the discovery of a series of unusual cracks in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: windows that seem to give on to alternate realities. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its helm, classifies these windows as a threat to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid reason and return to instinct, yet, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their significance and their value is in some way crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between purity and maturity is prepared.

Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth

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