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Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are faltering and failing."

Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey

Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first revealed three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the skies are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but below, buses are caught and drinks is drunk, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to expand the church's dominium. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable good, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe

In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to the original series, her movements and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe. Her individual quest to reconnect with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the central battleground in a broader war with an controlling system which, as these systems always have, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thinking, originality and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The book opens with the discovery of a collection of strange openings in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into other worlds. An example of a window appears to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic struggle between purity and maturity is established.

Plot Rhythm and Character Development

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