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Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are weakening and failing."

Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey

Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in animal form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are ridden and tea is drunk, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, warier, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to expand the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which appears in some way to be the source of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable good, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.

Like the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe

In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her path are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe. Her personal journey to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to suppress freedom of thinking, originality and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.

Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles

The novel begins with the finding of a collection of curious cracks in the fabric of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to open into other worlds. One such portal appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its helm, labels these windows as a threat to the church's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid logic and return to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic struggle between naivety and maturity is established.

Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution

At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the