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Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey

Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and beverages is consumed, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

His choice to leave in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound power to expand the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.

Like the first series, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm

In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world. Her individual mission to reunite with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a larger battle with an controlling regime which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to quell independence of thinking, originality and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.

Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles

The novel opens with the discovery of a series of curious cracks in the fabric of the Earth's air: portals that appear to give on to different dimensions. A particular opening manifests to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these windows as a challenge to the church's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously essential – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic conflict between purity and knowledge is established.

Story Tempo and Character Development

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