Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in animal form; where the air are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but below, buses are taken and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and determined main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound authority to expand the institution's control. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her path are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the fate of the universe. Her personal journey to reunite with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the primary struggle in a wider battle with an controlling system which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to quell autonomy of thinking, innovation and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the unveiling of a collection of strange openings in the fabric of the Earth's sky: windows that seem to open into other worlds. One such portal seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these openings as a threat to the institution's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict rationalism and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between naivety and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
