Tings are unraveling in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are ridden and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the church's governing body, and is set on using his newfound power to expand the institution's control. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to the city to discover more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from that area. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her path are shown to be deeply woven with the destiny of the world. Her individual mission to reunite with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a wider conflict with an controlling regime which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to quell freedom of thinking, innovation and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the finding of a series of curious cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to lead to alternate realities. A particular portal appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these portals as a threat to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible reason and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their significance and their value is mysteriously vital – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean conflict between innocence and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
