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Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are faltering and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in creature form; where the heavens are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and drinks is drunk, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and determined main character of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh power to extend the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by various factions as a marketable good, by others as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.

As in the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the future of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her fate are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a broader war with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to stifle autonomy of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles

The book opens with the unveiling of a series of strange cracks in the makeup of the world's sky: portals that seem to give on to different dimensions. One such opening appears to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its head, classifies these windows as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from strict reason and return to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic struggle between naivety and experience is prepared.

Narrative Pacing and Character Development

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