Things are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are ridden and tea is drunk, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and determined main character of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to broaden the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which seems somehow to be the source of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The substance is seen by various factions as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the fate of the realm. Her individual mission to reunite with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the central battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling government which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story begins with the discovery of a collection of strange fissures in the structure of the planet's sky: gateways that look to open into alternate realities. A particular opening seems to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these openings as a problem to the church's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict reason and back to instinct, however, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic tussle between naivety and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
