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Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are weakening and failing."

Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey

Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are ridden and tea is drunk, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound authority to expand the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which appears in some way to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.

As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the fate of the world

In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her fate are revealed to be inextricably woven with the fate of the universe. Her individual journey to reconnect with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a broader conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems always have, is seeking to quell autonomy of reason, originality and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be free.

Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts

The novel opens with the finding of a set of unusual fissures in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: portals that look to lead to different dimensions. A particular portal manifests to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these portals as a threat to the religion's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible logic and back to feeling, yet, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously essential – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical conflict between purity and knowledge is prepared.

Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth

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