Things are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in quest of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to extend the church's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from the region. The substance is seen by certain groups as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Like the original series, Lyra's actions and her fate are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the key struggle in a larger war with an controlling system which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to stifle independence of reason, creativity and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the discovery of a series of unusual fissures in the fabric of the Earth's sky: gateways that seem to give on to alternate realities. An example of a window seems to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, designates these portals as a threat to the institution's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is in some way vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic struggle between naivety and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
