Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, transports are ridden and tea is sipped, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and determined heroine of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, warier, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in search of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to broaden the religion's control. Another protagonist, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which appears in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by others as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her destiny are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her personal quest to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a wider conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to quell independence of thinking, creativity and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story begins with the unveiling of a set of curious cracks in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: gateways that seem to lead to alternate realities. One such window manifests to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, designates these portals as a problem to the religion's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid rationalism and revert to feeling, however, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
