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Tings are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are weakening and giving way."

Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and tea is sipped, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and persistent main character of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

His choice to leave in quest of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound authority to extend the religion's control. A key character, who saved young Lyra to security along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a commercial product, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the original series, her movements and her fate are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a wider war with an controlling system which, as such authorities always have, is striving to suppress independence of thought, creativity and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be free.

Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles

The novel begins with the unveiling of a set of unusual fissures in the fabric of the Earth's sky: portals that look to open into other worlds. An example of a window seems to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, labels these windows as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid rationalism and back to instinct, however, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between purity and experience is set.

Story Tempo and Character Development

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