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Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are weakening and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey

Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding foray into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in beast form; where the air are populated with witches and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and drinks is drunk, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's rule. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The substance is seen by various factions as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.

Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm

In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to the original series, her choices and her path are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm. Her individual mission to reconnect with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a wider battle with an oppressive government which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to quell freedom of reason, originality and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles

The novel starts with the finding of a series of curious openings in the makeup of the world's air: gateways that look to lead to other worlds. One such window manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its helm, designates these windows as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid logic and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way essential – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and maturity is prepared.

Plot Rhythm and Character Development

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