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Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."

Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path

Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are taken and beverages is consumed, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, warier, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh power to broaden the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable good, by others as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.

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

In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her path are revealed to be inseparably woven with the fate of the universe. Her private mission to reunite with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a wider war with an controlling government which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to suppress independence of thinking, originality and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.

Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles

The novel opens with the discovery of a collection of unusual fissures in the structure of the planet's air: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. A particular opening seems to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these portals as a threat to the religion's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict reason and back to instinct, yet, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is somehow essential – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between innocence and knowledge is established.

Story Tempo and Character Development

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