🔗 Share this article

Tings are falling apart in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are faltering and failing."

Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path

Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in animal form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, 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 the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the church's control. Another protagonist, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to the city to find out more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by others as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.

As in the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the realm

In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her path are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the future of the realm. Her private mission to reunite with her companion and recover her vision becomes the central struggle in a broader conflict with an oppressive government which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to suppress freedom of reason, originality and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The story opens with the discovery of a series of strange cracks in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: windows that look to open into alternate realities. An example of a opening seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these windows as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict rationalism and return to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between naivety and maturity is set.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the