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Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are weakening and giving way."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are ridden and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and determined main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh power to expand the institution's control. Another protagonist, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to the city to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which seems somehow to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is regarded by various factions as a marketable product, by others as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.

Similar to the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm

In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her fate are unveiled to be deeply woven with the fate of the realm. Her personal mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to stifle autonomy of reason, originality and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The book starts with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the makeup of the world's air: portals that seem to lead to alternate realities. One such portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these portals as a threat to the church's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict rationalism and return to intuition, yet, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic conflict between innocence and experience is established.

Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution

At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the