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Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are faltering and giving way."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in creature form; where the air are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are taken and drinks is drunk, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but older, sadder, warier, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to expand the religion's dominium. A key character, who saved young Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from the region. The extract is seen by certain groups as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe

In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the original series, her actions and her fate are revealed to be inseparably woven with the fate of the realm. Her personal journey to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a broader battle with an controlling government which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of thought, originality and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The story begins with the unveiling of a series of strange cracks in the structure of the world's air: gateways that appear to give on to other worlds. One such window seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these windows as a threat to the institution's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid logic and return to intuition, yet, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow essential – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic struggle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the