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Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are faltering and giving way."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and beverages is consumed, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more careful, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound power to extend the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable good, by others as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.

Like the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her movements and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply woven with the destiny of the realm. Her personal mission to rejoin with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the central battleground in a wider conflict with an oppressive regime which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to suppress independence of thinking, originality and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The book opens with the unveiling of a collection of unusual openings in the fabric of the world's sky: portals that seem to lead to alternate realities. A particular opening appears to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these portals as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and revert to intuition, yet, her belief that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is somehow vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between purity and experience is prepared.

Plot Rhythm and Character Development

At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the