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Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking 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 religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are faltering and giving way."

The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey

Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in creature form; where the skies are populated with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

His choice to leave in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the church's governing body, and is set on using his fresh influence to broaden the church's control. A key character, who saved young Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

Like the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply connected with the fate of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the original series, Lyra's actions and her path are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the world. Her individual mission to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a larger conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to quell freedom of reason, originality and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The book begins with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the fabric of the Earth's sky: windows that appear to lead to alternate realities. One such window seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these portals as a threat to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible logic and back to feeling, yet, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is somehow vital – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical struggle between purity and knowledge is established.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

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