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Tings are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are weakening and collapsing."

Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in creature form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are ridden and tea is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to broaden the church's control. Another protagonist, who saved baby Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The oil is viewed by various factions as a tradeable good, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.

As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm

In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, her movements and her fate are unveiled to be deeply woven with the fate of the universe. Her personal quest to reunite with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a wider conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to quell freedom of thought, innovation and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.

Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles

The book starts with the discovery of a set of strange openings in the makeup of the planet's air: windows that seem to lead to other worlds. A particular portal appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, labels these windows as a threat to the institution's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict logic and back to intuition, yet, her belief that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between innocence and knowledge is established.

Story Tempo and Character Development

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