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Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are faltering and failing."

Key Puzzle and Her Quest

Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in creature form; where the heavens are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but below, transports are taken and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

His choice to depart in search of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh power to broaden the religion's dominium. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to security along a swollen river as an child 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 plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.

Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe

In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are shown to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the world. Her private quest to rejoin with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a larger conflict with an oppressive system which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to quell autonomy of thinking, originality and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.

Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles

The story begins with the unveiling of a series of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: gateways that seem to open into alternate realities. An example of a portal manifests to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its helm, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible reason and back to intuition, however, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is in some way essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean tussle between purity and knowledge is established.

Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution

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