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Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are weakening and giving way."

Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path

Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's last excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in animal form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and tea is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to extend the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The substance is viewed by some as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.

Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the realm

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are unveiled to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm. Her private journey to rejoin with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the key struggle in a broader battle with an controlling system which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to suppress autonomy of thought, innovation and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The novel begins with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's air: portals that look to open into other worlds. An example of a window manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these windows as a threat to the church's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid logic and back to feeling, yet, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is in some way vital – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical conflict between purity and maturity is set.

Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth

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