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Things are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are faltering and collapsing."

Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey

Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in creature form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, transports are caught and tea is drunk, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his newfound power to extend the church's control. A key character, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to a key location to find out more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The substance is viewed by various factions as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.

Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the future of the realm

In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her path are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her private journey to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a larger battle with an authoritarian system which, as these systems typically do, is striving to quell independence of thinking, originality and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The book begins with the unveiling of a set of curious cracks in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that look to open into alternate realities. A particular window seems to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, designates these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid logic and back to feeling, yet, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between naivety and knowledge is set.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

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