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Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are weakening and collapsing."

Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path

Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with 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 paired by daemons, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but below, transports are ridden and tea is consumed, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and determined main character of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh power to extend the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young the heroine to security along a flooded river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The oil is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.

As in the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe

In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world. Her personal mission to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the central battleground in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress independence of thought, innovation and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles

The story begins with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: portals that seem to lead to other worlds. One such portal seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these openings as a problem to the religion's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and return to instinct, however, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic conflict between purity and experience is established.

Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution

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