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Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and giving way."

Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path

Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and drinks is drunk, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more careful, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the church's governing body, and is set on using his fresh influence to expand the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued baby the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to find out more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The oil is viewed by some as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.

As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the original series, the protagonist's actions and her path are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the future of the realm. Her private quest to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a broader conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to suppress independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The story starts with the discovery of a set of curious fissures in the structure of the world's sky: gateways that seem to lead to other worlds. One such window seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these portals as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict reason and return to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between purity and experience is set.

Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth

At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the