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Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and collapsing."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the air are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but below, buses are ridden and beverages is drunk, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, warier, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to leave in search of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh influence to extend the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by others as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.

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

In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world. Her private journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her vision becomes the central struggle in a broader war with an controlling government which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to suppress independence of thinking, originality and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.

Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles

The novel begins with the unveiling of a collection of curious cracks in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that appear to open into alternate realities. A particular portal appears to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with its leader at its leadership, designates these portals as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible reason and back to feeling, however, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously vital – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic conflict between purity and experience is established.

Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth

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