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Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are weakening and failing."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, transports are caught and tea is drunk, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

Pan's decision to leave in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about his intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from the region. The extract is regarded by some as a tradeable product, by others as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.

Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the future of the universe

In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm. Her personal journey to reunite with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a wider conflict with an oppressive system which, as these systems typically do, is striving to suppress freedom of thinking, innovation and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.

Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles

The book starts with the finding of a series of unusual fissures in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: gateways that seem to give on to other worlds. A particular window appears to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, labels these openings as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible reason and back to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their significance and their value is somehow crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between innocence and experience is set.

Plot Rhythm and Character Development

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