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Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are faltering and giving way."

Key Puzzle and Her Quest

Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to expand the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from the region. The extract is viewed by some as a tradeable product, by others as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.

As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the realm

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, her movements and her path are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the realm. Her individual quest to reunite with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the key battleground in a broader battle with an controlling system which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to quell freedom of thinking, originality and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The novel starts with the discovery of a collection of unusual cracks in the fabric of the Earth's sky: portals that look to open into alternate realities. An example of a portal appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these windows as a problem to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible reason and return to instinct, however, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.

Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution

At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the