Tings are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the air are populated with witches and gryphons, but underneath, transports are taken and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh power to expand the church's dominium. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from that area. The oil is seen by certain groups as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her personal mission to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a wider battle with an controlling regime which, as these systems always have, is striving to stifle independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story begins with the finding of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the planet's sky: gateways that look to open into other worlds. One such opening seems to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, designates these windows as a problem to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between naivety and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
