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Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are weakening and failing."

Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh power to broaden the institution's control. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and financial crisis rippling out from that area. The oil is seen by certain groups as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the world

In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her fate are shown to be inseparably woven with the fate of the world. Her individual quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a broader conflict with an controlling regime which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to quell freedom of thought, creativity and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles

The book starts with the finding of a collection of unusual cracks in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: portals that seem to open into alternate realities. One such portal seems to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these portals as a problem to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid logic and return to feeling, yet, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way crucial – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is established.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

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