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Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are faltering and failing."

Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey

Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in creature form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and determined heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to depart in search of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh power to broaden the religion's dominium. A key character, who carried baby Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable good, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her path are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her private journey to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a larger conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to stifle freedom of thought, originality and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The story starts with the discovery of a series of curious openings in the makeup of the planet's sky: gateways that seem to give on to alternate realities. One such opening appears to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict rationalism and return to instinct, yet, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean tussle between innocence and experience is set.

Story Tempo and Character Development

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