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Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are faltering and giving way."

Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey

Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, the author's last foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are taken and drinks is drunk, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to security along a flooded river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which appears somehow to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from that area. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the world

In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, her movements and her destiny are revealed to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her private journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a larger conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of thought, creativity and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The book opens with the finding of a set of curious cracks in the structure of the planet's sky: portals that appear to lead to different dimensions. An example of a window manifests to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, labels these portals as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict rationalism and back to feeling, yet, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is somehow essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic struggle between innocence and maturity is established.

Plot Rhythm and Character Development

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