Tings are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first introduced three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are ridden and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the church's governing body, and is set on using his newfound authority to extend the religion's control. Another protagonist, who carried young Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which appears in some way to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from the region. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a marketable good, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. As in the original series, Lyra's movements and her path are revealed to be deeply woven with the destiny of the world. Her personal journey to rejoin with her soul and regain her vision becomes the primary conflict in a wider war with an oppressive government which, as these systems always have, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thought, creativity and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the finding of a series of curious fissures in the makeup of the world's sky: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its helm, labels these portals as a threat to the church's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to instinct, however, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their significance and their value is mysteriously crucial – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical struggle between purity and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
