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Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and giving way."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in beast form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, transports are caught and beverages is drunk, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to extend the religion's control. A key character, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.

Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the world

In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her private quest to reunite with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a wider conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress independence of reason, creativity and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The novel starts with the discovery of a collection of unusual cracks in the makeup of the world's air: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a window appears to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its head, designates these windows as a problem to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible logic and revert to instinct, however, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way essential – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic conflict between innocence and knowledge is established.

Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth

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