Tings are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the air are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and tea is consumed, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's control. A key character, who carried infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which appears in some way to be the source of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her path are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her personal quest to rejoin with her soul and regain her vision becomes the primary conflict in a wider conflict with an oppressive system which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to suppress autonomy of reason, creativity and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the unveiling of a collection of strange cracks in the fabric of the world's sky: windows that appear to lead to other worlds. A particular window seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its helm, designates these windows as a problem to the institution's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
