Tings are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are caught and beverages is drunk, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh power to expand the church's rule. A key character, who saved young the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the original series, the protagonist's movements and her path are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world. Her individual mission to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a broader war with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems always have, is attempting to stifle independence of reason, originality and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the finding of a set of unusual cracks in the makeup of the world's sky: gateways that look to lead to different dimensions. An example of a window seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its leadership, labels these openings as a problem to the institution's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible reason and return to instinct, however, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way vital – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between innocence and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
