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Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are faltering and collapsing."

Key Puzzle and Her Quest

Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in beast form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, transports are taken and tea is sipped, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh influence to extend the religion's control. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from the region. The extract is viewed by some as a tradeable product, by others as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

Like the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world

In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm. Her personal mission to reunite with her companion and recover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to suppress freedom of thought, originality and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The story starts with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the structure of the world's sky: gateways that appear to open into other worlds. One such opening manifests to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, labels these windows as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid logic and return to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between naivety and maturity is established.

Story Tempo and Character Development

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