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Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are faltering and giving way."

Key Puzzle and Her Quest

Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release 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 reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in animal form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are ridden and tea is consumed, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

Pan's decision to go off in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his newfound influence to extend the religion's control. Another protagonist, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The substance is seen by various factions as a commercial commodity, by others as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.

Similar to the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the future of the world

In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her destiny are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe. Her personal quest to rejoin with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the central battleground in a broader battle with an controlling regime which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to suppress independence of reason, innovation and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles

The book begins with the discovery of a set of curious openings in the structure of the world's atmosphere: portals that appear to lead to other worlds. One such portal seems to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their significance and their value is in some way crucial – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between naivety and experience is prepared.

Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution

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