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Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next 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. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are weakening and failing."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates this final volume, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and tea is consumed, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to expand the institution's dominium. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about his aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.

Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the realm

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her fate are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a broader war with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to quell independence of thinking, originality and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The book starts with the unveiling of a set of unusual fissures in the makeup of the Earth's air: portals that look to open into different dimensions. A particular opening seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these windows as a threat to the church's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict logic and back to intuition, however, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between purity and experience is set.

Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth

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