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Things are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are weakening and giving way."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are ridden and drinks is consumed, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and determined main character of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh influence to broaden the church's control. Another protagonist, who carried infant the heroine to security along a swollen river as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which appears somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The oil is regarded by some as a commercial commodity, by others as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.

As in the first series, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the future of the universe

In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the original series, Lyra's choices and her path are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm. Her individual journey to rejoin with her soul and recover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a broader war with an controlling regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to quell independence of reason, innovation and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The story starts with the discovery of a series of strange cracks in the makeup of the planet's air: portals that seem to lead to other worlds. A particular window seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the church's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible logic and back to intuition, however, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their significance and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.

Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth

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