Tings are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are caught and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to extend the institution's control. A key character, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by various factions as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to the original series, her choices and her path are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a broader battle with an oppressive government which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to quell freedom of thinking, innovation and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a collection of strange cracks in the structure of the world's atmosphere: gateways that appear to open into alternate realities. An example of a window seems to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, labels these windows as a threat to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict rationalism and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their meaning and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic tussle between purity and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
