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Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."

Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path

Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and tea is consumed, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but older, sadder, warier, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to depart in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his newfound authority to expand the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by some as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.

Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably connected with the fate of the realm

In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her fate are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm. Her private journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a wider war with an controlling system which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thinking, innovation and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The book starts with the unveiling of a collection of curious fissures in the structure of the world's sky: portals that seem to give on to alternate realities. An example of a window manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its helm, designates these windows as a threat to the church's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, however, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between innocence and knowledge is set.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

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