Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and beverages is consumed, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), 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 amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound authority to extend the institution's control. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about his plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The substance is seen by various factions as a commercial product, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her fate are unveiled to be deeply linked with the future of the realm. Her individual journey to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to quell freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story begins with the discovery of a collection of strange openings in the structure of the Earth's sky: windows that look to give on to different dimensions. An example of a window appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these windows as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict reason and back to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic conflict between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
