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Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and failing."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

Pan's decision to leave in quest of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the church's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to extend the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to the city to discover more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.

As in the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the realm

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the original series, her actions and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably woven with the future of the world. Her private journey to rejoin with her soul and recover her vision becomes the key conflict in a wider war with an oppressive system which, as these systems always have, is seeking to quell freedom of reason, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The story opens with the discovery of a collection of curious fissures in the fabric of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to give on to alternate realities. A particular window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these portals as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and return to intuition, however, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between naivety and experience is prepared.

Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution

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