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Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and failing."

Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, buses are taken and beverages is consumed, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the church's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which seems in some way to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her future, are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the world

In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the original series, her movements and her fate are unveiled to be deeply woven with the future of the realm. Her individual journey to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a broader conflict with an controlling regime which, as these systems always have, is striving to quell freedom of thought, innovation and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The book opens with the discovery of a series of strange openings in the structure of the world's air: gateways that appear to lead to other worlds. A particular window manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these openings as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and revert to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is in some way crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical tussle between innocence and experience is set.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

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