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Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are weakening and giving way."

Key Puzzle and Her Quest

Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in beast form; where the skies are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are ridden and drinks is drunk, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

Pan's decision to depart in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound power to extend the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who carried baby Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to a key location to find out more about his aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by some as a tradeable commodity, by others as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.

Like the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the realm

In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, her movements and her path are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her individual quest to reunite with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a broader conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to stifle freedom of thought, innovation and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The story opens with the unveiling of a series of curious fissures in the structure of the planet's air: windows that appear to lead to other worlds. One such window seems to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these windows as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible reason and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is in some way essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between purity and maturity is set.

Plot Rhythm and Character Development

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