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Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are faltering and collapsing."

Key Puzzle and Her Quest

Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are taken and beverages is consumed, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, warier, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

His choice to leave in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound power to extend the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to a key location to learn more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by various factions as a commercial good, by others as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.

Like the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her personal quest to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the key struggle in a wider conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to suppress freedom of thought, creativity and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.

Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles

The story starts with the finding of a collection of strange openings in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that appear to lead to different dimensions. An example of a portal appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its head, designates these openings as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible logic and return to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean conflict between naivety and experience is set.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

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