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Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are faltering and giving way."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in beast form; where the air are filled with witches and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and tea is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound power to broaden the church's control. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by various factions as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.

Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the fate of the world

In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, her choices and her path are revealed to be deeply woven with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a wider conflict with an authoritarian government which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to quell freedom of thinking, innovation and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.

Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles

The novel opens with the unveiling of a collection of strange cracks in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that seem to lead to other worlds. An example of a opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these windows as a problem to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid reason and return to feeling, yet, her conviction that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously essential – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic struggle between purity and maturity is prepared.

Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth

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