Tings are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in beast form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and determined heroine of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the religion's dominium. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The extract is regarded by some as a commercial good, by others as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her path are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world. Her personal journey to reunite with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the key struggle in a wider conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to suppress freedom of reason, originality and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the unveiling of a set of curious cracks in the structure of the world's sky: gateways that seem to lead to different dimensions. An example of a portal appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these windows as a challenge to the church's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid rationalism and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
