Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the skies are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are ridden and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to extend the church's dominium. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her path are shown to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her private mission to reconnect with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a larger battle with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to stifle autonomy of reason, originality and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the discovery of a series of unusual fissures in the fabric of the Earth's air: windows that look to give on to other worlds. An example of a portal appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid reason and return to instinct, yet, her belief that these places must be defended – that their significance and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between purity and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
