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Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are weakening and collapsing."

Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path

Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, transports are taken and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.

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

In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her individual quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the central battleground in a broader conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to stifle freedom of thinking, creativity and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles

The novel begins with the discovery of a set of strange fissures in the makeup of the planet's air: portals that seem to open into different dimensions. One such opening manifests to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, classifies these portals as a problem to the institution's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict reason and back to feeling, however, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously crucial – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between naivety and maturity is established.

Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution

At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the