Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more careful, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh influence to broaden the church's rule. A key character, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are shown to be deeply connected with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, her choices and her path are unveiled to be deeply woven with the future of the world. Her individual mission to reconnect with her companion and recover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a wider battle with an oppressive government which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to stifle autonomy of thought, creativity and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the unveiling of a collection of unusual cracks in the structure of the world's atmosphere: portals that look to open into alternate realities. An example of a portal manifests to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its head, classifies these windows as a threat to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict logic and return to feeling, however, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical conflict between innocence and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
