Tings are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the skies are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are caught and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to extend the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by various factions as a commercial good, by others as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. As in the first trilogy, her actions and her path are unveiled to be deeply woven with the future of the realm. Her private journey to rejoin with her soul and recover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a wider war with an oppressive government which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to stifle freedom of reason, creativity and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the discovery of a series of curious openings in the structure of the Earth's sky: portals that appear to open into other worlds. A particular opening seems to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, labels these windows as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict reason and back to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic struggle between purity and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
