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Tings are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are weakening and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in beast form; where the air are filled with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are taken and tea is consumed, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

His choice to depart in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his newfound power to extend the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from the region. The extract is seen by various factions as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.

Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the future of the realm

In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the original series, her choices and her path are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm. Her individual quest to rejoin with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the key conflict in a larger conflict with an oppressive system which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to stifle independence of thought, creativity and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The story starts with the unveiling of a series of unusual fissures in the makeup of the planet's air: portals that seem to give on to alternate realities. One such portal seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, designates these windows as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict rationalism and revert to intuition, however, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow vital – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic struggle between purity and experience is set.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

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