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Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are faltering and failing."

Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey

Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and persistent main character of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more careful, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the church's governing body, and is set on using his newfound authority to broaden the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to the city to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a tradeable product, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

Similar to the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the original series, her choices and her destiny are shown to be inseparably woven with the future of the realm. Her personal quest to reunite with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a broader conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems typically do, is striving to suppress autonomy of thinking, creativity and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.

Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts

The story begins with the finding of a collection of strange cracks in the fabric of the world's air: gateways that seem to give on to different dimensions. One such window seems to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The church, with its leader at its leadership, labels these openings as a threat to the religion's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between innocence and experience is set.

Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution

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