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Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and failing."

Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in beast form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and tea is sipped, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and determined main character of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

Pan's decision to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound power to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to the city to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by others as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the destiny of the universe

In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her fate are unveiled to be deeply woven with the fate of the universe. Her individual quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a larger battle with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities always have, is striving to suppress independence of reason, innovation and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The story opens with the finding of a series of curious openings in the structure of the world's air: windows that appear to give on to alternate realities. One such window appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, designates these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict logic and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is somehow essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean tussle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.

Story Tempo and Character Development

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