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Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are weakening and collapsing."

Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path

Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in beast form; where the air are populated with witches and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and tea is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, warier, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired power to expand the church's control. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which seems in some way to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from that area. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by others as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.

Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the world

In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the original series, her movements and her path are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her private quest to reconnect with her soul and regain her vision becomes the central battleground in a broader battle with an authoritarian system which, as these systems always have, is attempting to suppress autonomy of reason, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles

The novel starts with the discovery of a collection of strange fissures in the structure of the world's air: windows that appear to give on to other worlds. An example of a window seems to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its helm, classifies these portals as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid logic and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is in some way crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between innocence and maturity is set.

Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution

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