Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the skies are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired power to broaden the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which seems in some way to be the source of a social and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by some as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, her actions and her fate are revealed to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm. Her personal quest to reconnect with her soul and regain her vision becomes the key conflict in a larger battle with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of thought, creativity and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the finding of a collection of strange cracks in the structure of the planet's air: portals that seem to give on to alternate realities. A particular opening seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its helm, labels these portals as a problem to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid reason and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
