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Things are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and giving way."

Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey

Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in beast form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and beverages is drunk, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the church's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to broaden the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable good, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.

Like the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the future of the world

In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the future of the world. Her private journey to rejoin with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a wider battle with an oppressive system which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to suppress freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The book begins with the finding of a collection of strange openings in the structure of the planet's sky: gateways that appear to give on to alternate realities. An example of a window manifests to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these portals as a challenge to the church's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid rationalism and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic struggle between naivety and experience is set.

Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth

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