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Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are faltering and failing."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are ridden and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and determined main character of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

Pan's decision to go off in quest of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound power to broaden the institution's rule. A key character, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which seems somehow to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The substance is seen by certain groups as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.

As in the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the future of the realm

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her personal mission to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thinking, innovation and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.

Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles

The story starts with the discovery of a series of unusual openings in the makeup of the Earth's air: portals that appear to lead to other worlds. One such portal appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these openings as a threat to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible logic and back to feeling, yet, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow essential – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.

Story Tempo and Character Development

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