Things are collapsing in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels this final volume, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are caught and tea is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound influence to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Like the original series, Lyra's choices and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her personal mission to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a wider conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems always have, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thinking, innovation and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story begins with the discovery of a set of strange openings in the fabric of the planet's air: portals that appear to give on to alternate realities. An example of a window appears to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, designates these windows as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and revert to instinct, however, her belief that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic tussle between naivety and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
