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Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and giving way."

Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey

Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are taken and drinks is sipped, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and determined main character of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of strict, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The oil is seen by some as a marketable good, by others as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.

As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the future of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her path are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her private journey to reconnect with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems always have, is striving to quell autonomy of thinking, innovation and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles

The story begins with the discovery of a collection of strange cracks in the makeup of the planet's air: gateways that appear to lead to other worlds. A particular opening manifests to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, classifies these windows as a challenge to the church's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid reason and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic tussle between naivety and experience is prepared.

Plot Rhythm and Character Development

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