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Tings are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are weakening and failing."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are populated with witches and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and beverages is drunk, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and determined main character of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – 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 ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the church's rule. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which appears somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.

Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her path are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world. Her individual journey to reconnect with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the primary struggle in a broader war with an oppressive government which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to quell freedom of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The story opens with the discovery of a series of unusual cracks in the fabric of the planet's sky: windows that look to lead to alternate realities. An example of a opening manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its head, designates these windows as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict logic and return to feeling, however, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is in some way essential – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between naivety and maturity is prepared.

Story Tempo and Character Development

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