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Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."

Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey

Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in beast form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to extend the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who carried infant Lyra to security along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable good, by others as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

Like the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her path are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her companion and recover her vision becomes the central struggle in a wider battle with an controlling government which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to suppress independence of thought, innovation and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The novel begins with the unveiling of a set of curious openings in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that seem to give on to different dimensions. One such portal manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, designates these portals as a problem to the religion's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and experience is established.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the