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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 world that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and giving way."

Key Puzzle and Her Quest

Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but below, buses are ridden and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh influence to expand the institution's control. A key character, who saved infant Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from that area. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a marketable product, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.

As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the destiny of the realm

In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's movements and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe. Her individual journey to reunite with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the primary struggle in a wider battle with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell autonomy of thought, creativity and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.

Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles

The story opens with the discovery of a set of curious cracks in the structure of the world's atmosphere: portals that appear to lead to different dimensions. One such opening seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its helm, designates these windows as a threat to the church's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid reason and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic conflict between purity and experience is established.

Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth

At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the