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Tings are falling apart in the last installment 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 slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are weakening and collapsing."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in creature form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound power to expand the religion's rule. A key character, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by others as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

Similar to the first series, the heroine's actions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the universe

In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her personal quest to reconnect with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a larger war with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell freedom of thinking, creativity and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The novel starts with the unveiling of a set of strange fissures in the structure of the Earth's sky: windows that seem to open into other worlds. A particular window seems to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its head, labels these portals as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible logic and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow vital – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between innocence and knowledge is prepared.

Story Tempo and Character Development

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