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Things are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are faltering and giving way."

Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are taken and tea is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

Pan's decision to go off in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to expand the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about his aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a tradeable good, by others as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her choices and her path are revealed to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a wider battle with an oppressive system which, as these systems always have, is striving to stifle autonomy of thinking, creativity and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The story opens with the unveiling of a series of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: windows that appear to open into different dimensions. An example of a opening seems to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these windows as a challenge to the church's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid logic and return to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between innocence and maturity is set.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the