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Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are faltering and giving way."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but older, sadder, warier, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

Pan's decision to go off in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound authority to expand the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to the city to learn more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The substance is viewed by some as a commercial good, by others as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

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

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her path are shown to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her private quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a larger war with an controlling government which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to stifle freedom of reason, creativity and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The story opens with the finding of a collection of strange openings in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that look to give on to other worlds. A particular window seems to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its leadership, designates these portals as a threat to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid reason and return to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic tussle between purity and knowledge is prepared.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

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