Things are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's last venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the skies are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and drinks is drunk, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and determined main character of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound authority to extend the religion's rule. A key character, who saved young Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to the city to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from that area. The substance is regarded by various factions as a commercial commodity, by others as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her path are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her individual quest to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a broader battle with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is striving to quell independence of thought, innovation and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a series of unusual openings in the structure of the world's air: gateways that look to lead to other worlds. A particular portal manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these windows as a threat to the church's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict logic and return to instinct, yet, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical struggle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
