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Tings are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are faltering and giving way."

Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey

Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in animal form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are caught and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and determined main character of the earlier books, but older, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired power to extend the religion's rule. A key character, who carried young the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is seen by various factions as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, its significance, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.

As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world

In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the original series, her choices and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her private mission to reconnect with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a wider conflict with an oppressive system which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to stifle freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The novel begins with the unveiling of a series of curious fissures in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: portals that seem to give on to alternate realities. An example of a opening manifests to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these portals as a threat to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and back to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their significance and their value is mysteriously vital – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between purity and knowledge is established.

Plot Rhythm and Character Development

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