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Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and giving way."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are taken and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

His choice to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound authority to extend the institution's control. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to find out 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 source of a social and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The extract is viewed by various factions as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.

Similar to the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world

In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her path are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her individual quest to reunite with her companion and regain her vision becomes the key conflict in a wider conflict with an controlling regime which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of reason, originality and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The book starts with the unveiling of a series of unusual fissures in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that look to open into different dimensions. A particular portal appears to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its leadership, labels these portals as a challenge to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and back to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is in some way essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between naivety and maturity is set.

Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution

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