🔗 Share this article

Things are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are weakening and failing."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are taken and drinks is sipped, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and determined main character of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of strict, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound influence to extend the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about his plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which appears somehow to be the origin of a social and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a commercial good, by others as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.

Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her choices and her fate are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world. Her individual journey to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a larger war with an controlling government which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to stifle independence of thinking, originality and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The book starts with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the fabric of the world's sky: windows that seem to lead to different dimensions. An example of a portal seems to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, designates these openings as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid reason and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is somehow vital – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between purity and experience is established.

Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution

At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the