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Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are weakening and giving way."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives this final volume, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and determined main character of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

Pan's decision to leave in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which appears in some way to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by others as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.

Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe

In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they merge. Like the original series, Lyra's actions and her destiny are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe. Her personal quest to reunite with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the central conflict in a broader conflict with an oppressive system which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to stifle independence of reason, innovation and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The book starts with the discovery of a set of strange fissures in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: gateways that appear to open into alternate realities. An example of a window manifests to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these windows as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid logic and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and maturity is established.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

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