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Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are weakening and failing."

Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path

Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are caught and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

Pan's decision to go off in search of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh power to extend the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried baby the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which appears somehow to be the source of a social and economic crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by some as a marketable product, by others as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.

Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her destiny are revealed to be deeply woven with the future of the universe. Her individual journey to reunite with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a broader war with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to quell independence of thought, creativity and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The book opens with the discovery of a series of unusual cracks in the fabric of the planet's sky: gateways that look to give on to different dimensions. An example of a portal appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and back to instinct, yet, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between naivety and knowledge is established.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

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