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Things are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and failing."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates this final volume, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound authority to broaden the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from that area. The extract is regarded by some as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.

As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm. Her individual journey to reunite with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a larger conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress autonomy of thinking, creativity and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The book starts with the finding of a series of curious cracks in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into other worlds. A particular portal appears to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these portals as a problem to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and return to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between naivety and maturity is established.

Plot Rhythm and Character Development

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