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Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are weakening and failing."

The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey

Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are ridden and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to extend the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried young Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from that area. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.

Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the original series, her choices and her path are revealed to be deeply woven with the fate of the world. Her individual mission to reunite with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to suppress independence of reason, originality and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The book starts with the finding of a collection of unusual fissures in the fabric of the world's air: windows that appear to open into other worlds. One such window appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these windows as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible reason and return to feeling, however, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic tussle between naivety and experience is set.

Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution

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