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Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are faltering and collapsing."

Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path

Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the air are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are caught and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

Pan's decision to leave in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound influence to expand the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from the region. The extract is viewed by various factions as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

Like the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply connected with the fate of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the fate of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell independence of thought, creativity and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.

Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles

The story begins with the finding of a series of unusual cracks in the structure of the world's atmosphere: gateways that look to open into other worlds. One such portal manifests to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, labels these openings as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict rationalism and revert to feeling, however, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and maturity is established.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the