Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's final excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh influence to broaden the church's rule. A key character, who saved baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about his intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and financial crisis emanating out from the region. The oil is seen by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the original series, Lyra's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the fate of the universe. Her private mission to reunite with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the central struggle in a wider battle with an oppressive system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to suppress autonomy of reason, originality and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the finding of a set of unusual cracks in the makeup of the planet's air: windows that appear to open into other worlds. One such window appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these portals as a threat to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to feeling, yet, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is somehow crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
