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Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are faltering and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in creature form; where the air are filled with witches and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are caught and tea is drunk, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

His choice to leave in search of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to expand the church's control. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which seems somehow to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from the region. The extract is regarded by some as a tradeable good, by others as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.

Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the future of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, her movements and her fate are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world. Her personal quest to reunite with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a wider conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell freedom of thought, originality and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.

Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles

The novel begins with the unveiling of a collection of curious openings in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that appear to give on to other worlds. An example of a portal appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these windows as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict reason and return to feeling, yet, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow vital – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical tussle between purity and maturity is prepared.

Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth

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