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Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are weakening and failing."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the skies are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but below, transports are ridden and tea is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to depart in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh influence to expand the church's control. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which appears in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from that area. The substance is seen by some as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.

Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world

In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Like the first trilogy, her choices and her fate are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her private journey to reunite with her companion and recover her vision becomes the key battleground in a larger war with an controlling government which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to quell independence of reason, creativity and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The novel opens with the unveiling of a collection of unusual cracks in the structure of the planet's sky: gateways that seem to lead to other worlds. One such opening seems to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these portals as a threat to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and back to instinct, however, her belief that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic struggle between innocence and experience is prepared.

Story Tempo and Character Development

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