Tings are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the air are populated with witches and gryphons, but below, transports are ridden and tea is consumed, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by various factions as a commercial product, by different parties as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. As in the original series, Lyra's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the future of the world. Her personal quest to reunite with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a wider battle with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to suppress independence of reason, innovation and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the discovery of a set of curious cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: portals that seem to open into other worlds. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these windows as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible logic and return to feeling, yet, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way vital – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic struggle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
