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Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and drinks is consumed, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound power to extend the church's dominium. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they merge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her personal quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a broader battle with an controlling regime which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress freedom of reason, creativity and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The book starts with the discovery of a series of curious cracks in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that seem to give on to alternate realities. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these windows as a challenge to the church's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from strict logic and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean struggle between naivety and experience is prepared.

Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth

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