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Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are faltering and giving way."

Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound power to extend the religion's dominium. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from the region. The oil is viewed by various factions as a tradeable good, by others as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

Like the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the realm

In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they come together. As in the original series, her movements and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm. Her individual mission to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a larger conflict with an oppressive regime which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to stifle independence of thought, creativity and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.

Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts

The book starts with the finding of a set of unusual cracks in the structure of the world's atmosphere: windows that look to open into other worlds. One such portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its helm, labels these openings as a problem to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical conflict between naivety and experience is established.

Story Tempo and Character Development

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