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Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates this final volume, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, transports are caught and beverages is drunk, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit 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 followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound influence to extend the institution's control. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The substance is seen by some as a tradeable good, by others as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her movements and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world. Her individual quest to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a broader battle with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to quell freedom of thought, originality and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The novel begins with the discovery of a collection of unusual fissures in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: gateways that seem to lead to other worlds. One such portal seems to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its helm, labels these windows as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict rationalism and back to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between naivety and maturity is set.

Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth

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