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Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first revealed three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, transports are caught and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

Pan's decision to depart in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired power to expand the church's dominium. A key character, who carried baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by some as a commercial good, by others as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.

As in the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the universe

In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, her actions and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her individual journey to reconnect with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a broader war with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to quell independence of reason, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles

The novel opens with the unveiling of a series of unusual cracks in the fabric of the planet's sky: windows that look to lead to alternate realities. An example of a opening appears to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, designates these portals as a threat to the church's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible rationalism and back to instinct, however, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow crucial – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between innocence and experience is established.

Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth

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