Things are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in animal form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are caught and tea is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of strict, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh authority to expand the church's rule. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to learn more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which appears somehow to be the origin of a social and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the original series, her movements and her path are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm. Her individual journey to reunite with her companion and regain her vision becomes the primary conflict in a wider conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to suppress freedom of reason, originality and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the unveiling of a series of strange openings in the makeup of the world's air: gateways that look to give on to other worlds. One such window seems to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these windows as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid reason and back to feeling, however, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously essential – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between purity and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
