Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound authority to broaden the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about his plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by various factions as a commercial commodity, by others as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her personal quest to reconnect with her companion and regain her vision becomes the central battleground in a broader conflict with an controlling government which, as such authorities always have, is striving to stifle freedom of reason, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the finding of a collection of curious cracks in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that appear to lead to alternate realities. One such portal manifests to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these portals as a threat to the religion's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict rationalism and back to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow essential – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean tussle between naivety and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
