Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in beast form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are ridden and tea is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to expand the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to find out more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the original series, Lyra's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her personal quest to reunite with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the central struggle in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as these systems always have, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the finding of a set of unusual fissures in the structure of the world's sky: portals that seem to give on to other worlds. A particular opening appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with its leader at its helm, classifies these portals as a problem to the religion's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously vital – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic tussle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
