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Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are faltering and collapsing."

Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape 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 animal souls, souls in creature form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and drinks is drunk, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect 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 wandering journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound authority to extend the church's dominium. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from the region. The oil is regarded by some as a marketable product, by others as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Like the original series, Lyra's choices and her destiny are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the key struggle in a wider battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to stifle autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles

The story opens with the unveiling of a set of unusual cracks in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. An example of a window manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its helm, labels these openings as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid logic and back to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is in some way 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 setting for a poetic tussle between innocence and experience is established.

Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth

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