Things are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the skies are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in search of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound influence to expand the church's control. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to learn more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The substance is viewed by some as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Like the original series, Lyra's movements and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the future of the world. Her individual journey to reunite with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the key conflict in a larger battle with an oppressive system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to suppress freedom of thought, creativity and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the finding of a series of unusual openings in the structure of the world's air: gateways that look to give on to alternate realities. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these windows as a threat to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean struggle between innocence and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
