Things are falling apart in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's last venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the heavens are populated with witches and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are caught and drinks is sipped, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the church's High Council, and is set on using his fresh influence to broaden the institution's control. A key character, who carried baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable good, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply connected with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the original series, Lyra's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her private journey to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to quell freedom of reason, originality and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the discovery of a set of curious fissures in the fabric of the world's air: windows that appear to open into different dimensions. One such portal seems to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict logic and back to feeling, however, her belief that these places must be protected – that their significance and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
