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Tings are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and failing."

Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey

Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are taken and tea is drunk, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and persistent main character of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to expand the religion's control. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by various factions as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

Like the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm

In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in the original series, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the future of the world. Her private mission to reconnect with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the key battleground in a wider conflict with an controlling regime which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to suppress freedom of thought, innovation and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles

The novel begins with the finding of a set of curious fissures in the structure of the world's sky: gateways that seem to lead to alternate realities. An example of a portal appears to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these openings as a problem to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between purity and knowledge is set.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

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