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Things are collapsing in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are weakening and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are ridden and tea is consumed, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and determined main character of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

His choice to go off in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound authority to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about his plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which appears somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by some as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.

As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the future of the realm

In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they merge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her fate are revealed to be inextricably woven with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the key struggle in a larger battle with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to suppress independence of reason, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The novel opens with the discovery of a collection of curious openings in the structure of the Earth's sky: portals that seem to lead to other worlds. A particular portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these windows as a problem to the institution's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid rationalism and back to instinct, however, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow crucial – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic conflict between naivety and experience is established.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

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