Things are falling apart in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and tea is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh influence to extend the church's control. A key character, who saved young the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The oil is viewed by some as a commercial product, by others as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the first trilogy, her movements and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm. Her personal mission to reconnect with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a wider conflict with an controlling regime which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to stifle autonomy of reason, creativity and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book starts with the finding of a collection of strange cracks in the makeup of the Earth's sky: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. An example of a opening manifests to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these portals as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible logic and return to instinct, yet, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between innocence and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
