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Things are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and failing."

Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path

Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in beast form; where the air are populated with witches and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and drinks is sipped, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

His choice to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to extend the religion's rule. A key character, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which appears somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.

Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the future of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the original series, Lyra's actions and her destiny are shown to be deeply woven with the destiny of the world. Her private quest to reconnect with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a wider conflict with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to stifle autonomy of reason, innovation and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.

Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles

The novel begins with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: portals that appear to give on to other worlds. One such window manifests to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its head, labels these openings as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid rationalism and return to intuition, yet, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and their value is in some way essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between innocence and maturity is set.

Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth

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