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Things are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are weakening and giving way."

The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey

Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are ridden and tea is sipped, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and determined main character of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

Pan's decision to leave in search of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound power to expand the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from the region. The extract is seen by various factions as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in the first series, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm

In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the world. Her individual mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her vision becomes the key battleground in a wider conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities always have, is striving to quell autonomy of reason, innovation and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The novel starts with the discovery of a collection of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's sky: gateways that look to open into alternate realities. An example of a portal seems to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its helm, labels these windows as a threat to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid logic and return to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic conflict between innocence and maturity is prepared.

Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution

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