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Things are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are faltering and collapsing."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are caught and tea is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound influence to broaden the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from the region. The substance is regarded by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm

In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her choices and her path are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the realm. Her individual mission to reconnect with her companion and regain her vision becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of thought, innovation and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be free.

Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles

The novel opens with the finding of a set of curious fissures in the makeup of the Earth's sky: gateways that look to open into alternate realities. One such opening seems to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, designates these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and back to instinct, however, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is in some way vital – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between purity and knowledge is established.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

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