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Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and giving way."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final foray into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but older, sadder, warier, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

His choice to go off in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to extend the religion's control. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to security along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from the region. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a commercial product, by different parties as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe

In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the central battleground in a broader war with an controlling regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to quell autonomy of thinking, innovation and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The book opens with the finding of a collection of curious fissures in the makeup of the planet's sky: windows that seem to give on to other worlds. A particular opening appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these openings as a threat to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible logic and back to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between purity and knowledge is prepared.

Narrative Pacing and Character Development

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