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Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are faltering and giving way."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

Pan's decision to go off in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh influence to broaden the church's control. A key character, who carried baby Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an young boy 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 his intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from the region. The oil is viewed by some as a marketable good, by others as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.

As in the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the universe

In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her individual journey to reunite with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a larger battle with an controlling government which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to quell autonomy of thought, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The book opens with the unveiling of a collection of curious cracks in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: portals that appear to open into alternate realities. One such window manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these windows as a threat to the religion's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from strict rationalism and back to instinct, yet, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their significance and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is set.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the