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Tings are unraveling in the concluding book 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 energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and giving way."

Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey

Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the skies are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, warier, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound authority to broaden the church's rule. Another protagonist, who carried baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a social and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The oil is viewed by some as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.

Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe

In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her personal mission to reconnect with her soul and recover her vision becomes the central struggle in a larger battle with an controlling regime which, as such regimes always have, is striving to suppress autonomy of reason, innovation and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.

Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles

The book starts with the discovery of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: portals that look to open into alternate realities. One such portal seems to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a challenge to the church's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and return to intuition, however, her belief that these sites must be defended – that their significance and their value is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between naivety and maturity is prepared.

Narrative Pacing and Character Development

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