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Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and failing."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in animal form; where the air are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and determined heroine of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved baby Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which seems somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The extract is regarded by various factions as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

Like the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. As in the original series, Lyra's actions and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the fate of the universe. Her personal quest to rejoin with her soul and recover her vision becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell freedom of reason, originality and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The book begins with the unveiling of a set of strange openings in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: gateways that look to give on to alternate realities. A particular portal manifests to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these windows as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict reason and revert to feeling, however, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between innocence and maturity is established.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

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