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Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are weakening and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, warier, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to leave in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the church's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to expand the religion's control. Another protagonist, who carried baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to a key location to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which seems in some way to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by certain groups as a marketable product, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.

Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm

In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they merge. As in the original series, Lyra's choices and her fate are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her personal quest to reunite with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the primary battleground in a broader battle with an controlling regime which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thought, originality and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.

Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles

The story starts with the unveiling of a collection of strange fissures in the makeup of the world's sky: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these windows as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their significance and their value is in some way crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between naivety and knowledge is set.

Story Tempo and Character Development

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