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Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and failing."

Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path

Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and tea is drunk, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, warier, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh influence to broaden the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried young Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.

Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe

In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe. Her personal journey to rejoin with her soul and recover her vision becomes the key conflict in a wider war with an oppressive system which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to suppress independence of reason, innovation and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.

Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles

The novel begins with the discovery of a series of unusual openings in the fabric of the planet's sky: portals that look to lead to other worlds. An example of a opening seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these openings as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible logic and return to instinct, however, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between naivety and knowledge is established.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

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