Things are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in animal form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound influence to broaden the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which appears in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by some as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to the original series, her actions and her fate are shown to be deeply woven with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the key battleground in a wider conflict with an controlling regime which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to stifle autonomy of thought, creativity and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the finding of a series of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's sky: gateways that appear to give on to other worlds. A particular opening manifests to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these windows as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid reason and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is in some way crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between naivety and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
