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Things are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are faltering and failing."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, transports are taken and tea is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound power to broaden the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued infant Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from that area. The substance is regarded by some as a marketable good, by different parties as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.

As in the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the world

In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Similar to the original series, her actions and her destiny are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the world. Her personal mission to reunite with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a larger battle with an authoritarian system which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to stifle autonomy of thought, originality and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.

Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles

The story starts with the finding of a collection of strange cracks in the structure of the world's air: windows that appear to give on to alternate realities. A particular window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, designates these openings as a threat to the religion's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid rationalism and revert to feeling, however, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic tussle between naivety and maturity is set.

Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth

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