Things are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's last excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are taken and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh authority to extend the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to the city to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which appears somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by some as a commercial good, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's actions and her fate are unveiled to be deeply linked with the fate of the world. Her individual quest to reunite with her companion and regain her vision becomes the central battleground in a wider battle with an authoritarian system which, as these systems always have, is attempting to quell autonomy of thinking, creativity and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the finding of a collection of curious cracks in the makeup of the planet's sky: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. One such window manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its head, classifies these openings as a threat to the institution's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible reason and return to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic struggle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
