Things are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are taken and tea is consumed, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh power to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which seems somehow to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from the region. The substance is viewed by various factions as a tradeable good, by others as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm. Her personal mission to rejoin with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the primary struggle in a larger battle with an oppressive government which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to stifle freedom of thought, innovation and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the discovery of a collection of curious fissures in the structure of the world's sky: portals that appear to lead to alternate realities. An example of a opening manifests to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these portals as a problem to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid rationalism and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical tussle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
