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Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and failing."

Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path

Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in creature form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and drinks is drunk, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to expand the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who saved baby Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by some as a marketable product, by others as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.

As in the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a broader conflict with an oppressive system which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to suppress freedom of thought, originality and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.

Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles

The book begins with the finding of a set of curious openings in the structure of the planet's air: windows that look to open into alternate realities. One such window appears to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its helm, labels these openings as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid reason and back to intuition, however, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously vital – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between innocence and experience is established.

Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth

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