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Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and giving way."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the air are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but below, transports are ridden and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and financial crisis spreading out from the region. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable product, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.

As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the realm

In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply woven with the destiny of the world. Her individual journey to reunite with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the key struggle in a wider war with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to quell freedom of reason, originality and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles

The book opens with the finding of a series of unusual openings in the structure of the planet's sky: windows that seem to open into other worlds. An example of a window seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its leadership, labels these windows as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict reason and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between naivety and experience is set.

Story Tempo and Character Development

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