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Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking 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 chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are weakening and giving way."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and beverages is consumed, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's control. A key character, who carried baby the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which seems in some way to be the source of a social and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by various factions as a commercial commodity, by others as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.

Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the original series, her actions and her path are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her individual quest to reunite with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to stifle independence of reason, originality and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be free.

Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts

The story starts with the discovery of a series of strange fissures in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that seem to lead to different dimensions. A particular portal manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its head, labels these openings as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict rationalism and back to feeling, yet, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between purity and maturity is set.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

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