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Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."

Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path

Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's final excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but below, transports are ridden and tea is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to extend the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which manifests in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable product, by others as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.

Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm

In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her personal quest to reunite with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a wider conflict with an controlling government which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to quell independence of reason, innovation and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The novel starts with the discovery of a collection of strange cracks in the fabric of the Earth's air: windows that look to give on to alternate realities. One such window seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these openings as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict logic and back to feeling, however, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that their significance and their value is in some way crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean struggle between purity and maturity is set.

Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth

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