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Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are weakening and failing."

Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey

Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are caught and beverages is consumed, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

Pan's decision to leave in quest of that innocent part of the heroine 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 saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried infant the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which appears in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by some as a marketable product, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.

As in the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the future of the realm

In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply woven with the fate of the universe. Her individual journey to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a broader conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thought, originality and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.

Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts

The book starts with the discovery of a series of strange cracks in the structure of the world's air: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. One such window manifests to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, designates these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible reason and return to intuition, yet, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean conflict between innocence and knowledge is set.

Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth

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