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Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are weakening and failing."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, buses are caught and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the religion's control. A key character, who rescued baby Lyra to security along a flooded river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from the region. The oil is seen by certain groups as a commercial good, by others as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.

Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the original series, her actions and her fate are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her personal mission to reconnect with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the key struggle in a wider war with an controlling system which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to suppress independence of thinking, originality and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The novel begins with the unveiling of a set of unusual openings in the fabric of the planet's sky: windows that look to lead to other worlds. One such opening seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these windows as a threat to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid logic and return to intuition, yet, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is in some way crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic struggle between naivety and maturity is set.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

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