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Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in creature form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are caught and drinks is drunk, and older scholars 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 toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to leave in quest of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh power to expand the institution's control. Another protagonist, who rescued infant Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to learn more about his plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from the region. The oil is viewed by various factions as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.

As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply connected with the destiny of the realm

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the original series, Lyra's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the world. Her individual quest to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a broader conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is striving to suppress independence of thinking, innovation and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The book starts with the unveiling of a set of curious openings in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that appear to lead to other worlds. One such portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these openings as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and revert to feeling, yet, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is in some way essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between innocence and experience is prepared.

Story Tempo and Character Development

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