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Things are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are faltering and giving way."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are ridden and drinks is sipped, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and persistent main character of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the church's governing body, and is set on using his newfound power to broaden the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which appears in some way to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by some as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.

Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the future of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Similar to the original series, her actions and her fate are revealed to be inseparably woven with the fate of the world. Her individual quest to reunite with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a larger battle with an oppressive government which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to quell independence of thinking, creativity and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.

Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles

The book opens with the discovery of a set of unusual cracks in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: gateways that look to open into other worlds. An example of a portal manifests to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these windows as a threat to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid logic and back to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their significance and their value is somehow essential – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic tussle between naivety and experience is prepared.

Story Tempo and Character Development

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