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Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are faltering and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels this final volume, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in beast form; where the skies are filled with witches and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound power to broaden the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which appears in some way to be the source of a social and financial crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable commodity, by others as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.

Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the future of the world

In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, her actions and her path are shown to be deeply woven with the destiny of the universe. Her private quest to reconnect with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a wider war with an oppressive system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to stifle autonomy of thinking, creativity and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles

The book begins with the finding of a series of curious openings in the structure of the world's sky: gateways that look to give on to other worlds. A particular opening manifests to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, designates these windows as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid reason and return to intuition, however, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way crucial – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic conflict between naivety and maturity is set.

Plot Rhythm and Character Development

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