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Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and failing."

Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey

Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in animal form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

Pan's decision to leave in quest of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to extend the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to the city to find out more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by others as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the world. Her private mission to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the central conflict in a larger war with an oppressive government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to quell independence of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The book starts with the finding of a collection of curious cracks in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that seem to give on to other worlds. An example of a window appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, classifies these portals as a threat to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible reason and revert to intuition, yet, her belief that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between naivety and maturity is established.

Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution

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