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Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and collapsing."

Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path

Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the air are populated with witches and gryphons, but underneath, transports are caught and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, warier, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

Pan's decision to leave in quest of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his newfound authority to extend the church's control. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The oil is regarded by some as a commercial commodity, by others as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.

Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, her actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her personal journey to rejoin with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a broader conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to quell autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.

Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles

The novel begins with the unveiling of a series of strange openings in the structure of the Earth's sky: gateways that seem to give on to different dimensions. One such opening appears to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these openings as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid logic and back to instinct, however, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is in some way essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between naivety and maturity is set.

Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth

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