Tings are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, 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 giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates this final volume, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and drinks is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and determined heroine of the previous installments, but older, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to expand the institution's rule. A key character, who saved young Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from that area. The substance is viewed by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by others as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her path are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe. Her individual quest to rejoin with her companion and recover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a wider conflict with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell independence of thought, innovation and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book starts with the unveiling of a set of curious fissures in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that look to give on to alternate realities. One such window seems to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid logic and revert to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between naivety and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
