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Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are faltering and collapsing."

Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey

Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh influence to expand the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about his aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is seen by some as a marketable product, by different parties as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.

Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the original series, the protagonist's choices and her path are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her private mission to reunite with her soul and recover her vision becomes the key struggle in a broader war with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to stifle autonomy of reason, creativity and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The story begins with the discovery of a set of curious openings in the makeup of the Earth's air: portals that seem to give on to different dimensions. One such portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these openings as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is somehow essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between innocence and maturity is established.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

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