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Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are weakening and collapsing."

Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey

Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible 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 power to expand the religion's control. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to the city to find out more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world

In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are shown to be inseparably woven with the fate of the universe. Her personal mission to reunite with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the central conflict in a broader conflict with an controlling regime which, as such authorities always have, is striving to quell independence of reason, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles

The book starts with the unveiling of a collection of strange openings in the makeup of the Earth's sky: windows that appear to open into different dimensions. A particular portal seems to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these openings as a threat to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid reason and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean tussle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.

Story Tempo and Character Development

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