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Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and giving way."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to expand the church's control. Another protagonist, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by some as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm

In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, her actions and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world. Her private journey to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a broader battle with an controlling government which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to suppress independence of reason, originality and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The story starts with the discovery of a series of unusual fissures in the structure of the world's sky: windows that appear to open into other worlds. A particular opening appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these openings as a threat to the church's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict rationalism and revert to feeling, yet, her belief that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is somehow crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean struggle between purity and knowledge is established.

Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution

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