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Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, transports are taken and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

His choice to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound influence to broaden the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant Lyra to security along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to the city to learn more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from that area. The extract is seen by various factions as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its significance, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

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

In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world. Her individual journey to reunite with her companion and regain her vision becomes the key battleground in a larger conflict with an oppressive government which, as these systems typically do, is striving to quell independence of thinking, originality and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The story begins with the discovery of a series of strange cracks in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that look to open into different dimensions. One such portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its head, classifies these windows as a problem to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible logic and back to intuition, yet, her belief that these places must be defended – that their meaning and their value is in some way crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean struggle between naivety and maturity is set.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

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