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Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are weakening and collapsing."

Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey

Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her split 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 depart in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired power to extend the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the world

In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her path are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her private quest to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the central conflict in a wider conflict with an controlling regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to suppress independence of thought, creativity and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The novel opens with the finding of a collection of strange cracks in the fabric of the Earth's air: gateways that seem to give on to alternate realities. An example of a window seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these openings as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible logic and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way crucial – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between innocence and maturity is prepared.

Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution

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