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Things are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and giving way."

The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey

Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are ridden and tea is consumed, and middle-aged scholars 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 infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound influence to expand the institution's control. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from the region. The oil is viewed by some as a commercial product, by others as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.

As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the destiny of the realm

In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her fate are shown to be deeply woven with the future of the universe. Her private quest to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a wider conflict with an oppressive government which, as such authorities always have, is striving to suppress autonomy of thinking, originality and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The story starts with the unveiling of a set of strange fissures in the structure of the world's sky: portals that look to lead to other worlds. An example of a window seems to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, labels these openings as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict logic and return to instinct, yet, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical tussle between naivety and experience is prepared.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

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