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Things are collapsing in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and failing."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in creature form; where the skies are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and tea is drunk, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and persistent main character of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh authority to extend the institution's dominium. A key character, who carried young the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.

Similar to the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the realm

In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be deeply woven with the future of the universe. Her individual mission to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a wider conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to stifle autonomy of reason, creativity and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles

The novel starts with the unveiling of a series of strange fissures in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: portals that appear to give on to alternate realities. One such portal manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, labels these openings as a problem to the church's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way essential – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic struggle between innocence and maturity is established.

Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth

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