Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are caught and drinks is consumed, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in quest of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to expand the religion's control. Another protagonist, who rescued baby the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by some as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her personal journey to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the key battleground in a wider war with an controlling regime which, as these systems always have, is attempting to stifle independence of thinking, innovation and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the finding of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's sky: windows that seem to give on to alternate realities. A particular opening seems to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible reason and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way essential – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between purity and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
