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Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and giving way."

Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey

Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the heavens are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and persistent main character of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, warier, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

His choice to go off in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired power to extend the religion's control. A key character, who saved young the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.

Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply connected with the future of the world

In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. As in the first trilogy, her actions and her destiny are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her individual quest to rejoin with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the key conflict in a wider battle with an oppressive government which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to stifle freedom of thinking, innovation and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The story starts with the unveiling of a set of curious openings in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that look to give on to alternate realities. One such window manifests to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its helm, designates these windows as a threat to the church's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict reason and back to instinct, yet, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between naivety and experience is prepared.

Narrative Pacing and Character Development

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