Things are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and drinks is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but older, sadder, warier, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and financial crisis spreading out from the region. The extract is seen by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by others as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's actions and her fate are revealed to be inextricably woven with the future of the realm. Her individual journey to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thought, originality and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story begins with the unveiling of a series of curious fissures in the structure of the world's sky: portals that appear to open into other worlds. One such window appears to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its head, labels these windows as a threat to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid reason and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical conflict between purity and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
