Things are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and tea is drunk, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to broaden the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to learn more about his plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The oil is seen by some as a commercial good, by others as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her path are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world. Her individual quest to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a broader war with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the unveiling of a set of unusual cracks in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that appear to open into alternate realities. One such opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, labels these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid logic and back to instinct, yet, her certainty that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
