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Tings are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and giving way."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are ridden and tea is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the church's High Council, and is set on using his newfound influence to broaden the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The oil is regarded by various factions as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.

As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm

In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the original series, Lyra's choices and her path are revealed to be inextricably woven with the future of the world. Her personal mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a wider war with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to quell freedom of thought, originality and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The book begins with the discovery of a set of unusual fissures in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: portals that look to open into alternate realities. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, designates these portals as a threat to the religion's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from strict logic and return to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between purity and knowledge is established.

Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth

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