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Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and giving way."

Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path

Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

His choice to go off in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to expand the church's control. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from the region. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, her choices and her fate are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe. Her personal journey to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the key battleground in a wider conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of reason, creativity and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The book opens with the discovery of a series of unusual fissures in the makeup of the world's sky: portals that seem to lead to alternate realities. One such window seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, designates these windows as a problem to the institution's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and revert to instinct, yet, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic conflict between innocence and knowledge is established.

Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth

At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the