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Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are faltering and giving way."

Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path

Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and beverages is sipped, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to extend the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from that area. The extract is regarded by some as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.

Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm

In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the original series, Lyra's actions and her fate are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the key struggle in a larger battle with an oppressive system which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to stifle independence of reason, originality and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.

Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles

The novel starts with the finding of a collection of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that look to open into other worlds. One such opening seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these portals as a problem to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid reason and back to instinct, yet, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic struggle between naivety and knowledge is established.

Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth

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