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Things are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are faltering and giving way."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and drinks is sipped, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to go off in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound power to expand the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.

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

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they converge. As in the original series, Lyra's actions and her path are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe. Her personal mission to rejoin with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the central conflict in a larger war with an controlling regime which, as these systems always have, is striving to quell autonomy of thought, originality and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The book starts with the discovery of a series of curious fissures in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that appear to lead to alternate realities. One such window manifests to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these openings as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible logic and return to feeling, however, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic struggle between purity and experience is prepared.

Plot Rhythm and Character Development

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