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Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are faltering and collapsing."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and drinks is drunk, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the institution's control. A key character, who saved young the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which appears in some way to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by some as a commercial product, by others as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, her movements and her path are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe. Her personal mission to reunite with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a wider battle with an controlling government which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to suppress freedom of thinking, creativity and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The book starts with the discovery of a series of unusual fissures in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: portals that appear to give on to other worlds. A particular window manifests to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these portals as a problem to the church's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible logic and revert to feeling, yet, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic struggle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.

Narrative Pacing and Character Development

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