Things are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and beverages is sipped, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued young Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from that area. The oil is seen by some as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they converge. As in the original series, Lyra's movements and her path are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm. Her private mission to reconnect with her soul and recover her vision becomes the central battleground in a larger conflict with an oppressive system which, as these systems always have, is attempting to quell independence of thinking, innovation and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the discovery of a collection of curious fissures in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: windows that look to lead to alternate realities. An example of a portal manifests to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, labels these openings as a threat to the religion's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid reason and return to intuition, yet, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is in some way crucial – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
