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Tings are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are faltering and failing."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are filled with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are taken and drinks is drunk, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and persistent main character of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

His choice to leave in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh influence to expand the institution's control. A key character, who saved baby Lyra to security along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The oil is regarded by some as a tradeable product, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.

Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm

In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the original series, the protagonist's actions and her fate are shown to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a larger battle with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to quell independence of reason, creativity and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The story starts with the discovery of a series of unusual fissures in the fabric of the planet's sky: portals that seem to lead to different dimensions. A particular window manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these openings as a threat to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict reason and return to instinct, yet, her belief that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic conflict between innocence and knowledge is set.

Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution

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