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Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and giving way."

Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path

Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in animal form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and tea is drunk, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and persistent main character of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, 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 austere, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his newfound influence to extend the church's rule. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and financial crisis rippling out from that area. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a marketable good, by others as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply connected with the fate of the universe

In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the original series, Lyra's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply woven with the future of the world. Her private mission to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a larger conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thought, creativity and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The novel begins with the finding of a collection of curious cracks in the makeup of the world's air: gateways that look to give on to alternate realities. An example of a window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, labels these openings as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and revert to instinct, however, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow essential – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean tussle between innocence and experience is established.

Story Tempo and Character Development

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