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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 world that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are weakening and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and tea is sipped, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

His choice to go off in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to a key location to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from the region. The oil is viewed by various factions as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.

Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, her choices and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her personal mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a broader war with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to suppress freedom of thought, originality and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.

Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles

The story starts with the discovery of a set of unusual cracks in the structure of the world's air: portals that appear to lead to different dimensions. One such opening manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid rationalism and return to intuition, yet, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow essential – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic tussle between innocence and maturity is prepared.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

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