Tings are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the air are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and beverages is sipped, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh authority to broaden the institution's dominium. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to security along a flooded river as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her personal mission to reconnect with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a wider battle with an oppressive system which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to suppress freedom of thought, creativity and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The story begins with the finding of a collection of strange fissures in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: portals that appear to give on to different dimensions. An example of a window manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these windows as a problem to the institution's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and revert to intuition, however, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is in some way vital – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical tussle between innocence and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
