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Things are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the air are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are caught and drinks is consumed, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent main character of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

His choice to depart in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound influence to extend the church's dominium. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which appears in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by various factions as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.

Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply connected with the destiny of the realm

In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the original series, Lyra's movements and her destiny are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the world. Her personal quest to reconnect with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a larger battle with an controlling government which, as these systems always have, is striving to quell independence of reason, originality and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The story opens with the unveiling of a set of strange fissures in the structure of the Earth's sky: portals that look to give on to other worlds. An example of a window seems to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these windows as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and return to feeling, yet, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical conflict between naivety and experience is set.

Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution

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