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Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are faltering and failing."

Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey

Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and beverages is drunk, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and persistent main character of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

Pan's decision to leave in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh influence to broaden the institution's control. Another protagonist, who rescued baby Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a commercial good, by different parties as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her private journey to reunite with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a larger battle with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to stifle freedom of thought, innovation and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The story opens with the finding of a series of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's sky: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. An example of a window manifests to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these windows as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid logic and revert to intuition, yet, her belief that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously essential – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between purity and experience is set.

Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution

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