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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 realm that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are faltering and failing."

The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey

Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in creature form; where the air are populated with witches and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh influence to extend the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to safety 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 assigned to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The substance is seen by some as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.

Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world

In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her destiny are shown to be deeply woven with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a larger war with an controlling regime which, as these systems always have, is striving to suppress independence of thought, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.

Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles

The story begins with the discovery of a series of unusual openings in the structure of the planet's sky: gateways that look to lead to other worlds. An example of a window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, classifies these openings as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid logic and back to feeling, however, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between purity and maturity is established.

Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth

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