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Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and giving way."

Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path

Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels this final volume, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound power to expand the religion's dominium. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to the city to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from that area. The oil is seen by various factions as a marketable good, by different parties as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.

As in the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the original series, her actions and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply woven with the future of the realm. Her private journey to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the central battleground in a larger battle with an authoritarian system which, as these systems always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.

Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles

The novel starts with the discovery of a collection of curious cracks in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that look to open into different dimensions. A particular portal manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, labels these windows as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible logic and back to intuition, yet, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is somehow crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between naivety and maturity is prepared.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

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