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Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are weakening and failing."

Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in creature form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

Pan's decision to go off in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to extend the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to the city to find out more about his aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.

Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her fate are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the world. Her private quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a wider battle with an controlling regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to stifle independence of thinking, originality and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The novel opens with the finding of a set of unusual fissures in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that seem to lead to other worlds. One such window seems to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these portals as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict reason and return to intuition, yet, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is somehow crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical tussle between innocence and knowledge is set.

Narrative Pacing and Character Development

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