Things are collapsing in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's last venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and drinks is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh power to extend the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by some as a marketable commodity, by others as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inextricably connected with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm. Her private journey to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the central conflict in a wider battle with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to quell freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the discovery of a series of curious fissures in the structure of the world's sky: gateways that seem to open into other worlds. An example of a opening manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, labels these portals as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is somehow crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between naivety and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
