Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in animal form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and persistent main character of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to extend the religion's dominium. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which appears somehow to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by certain groups as a marketable product, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her path are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the fate of the universe. Her individual quest to reunite with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a larger war with an controlling system which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to quell freedom of thought, innovation and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the unveiling of a collection of unusual openings in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a window manifests to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these windows as a challenge to the church's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and revert to feeling, however, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is somehow essential – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between purity and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
