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Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are faltering and collapsing."

Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey

Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the air are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and drinks is drunk, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his newfound authority to extend the institution's control. Another protagonist, who saved baby the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by various factions as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.

As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Like the original series, the protagonist's choices and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to reconnect with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a broader battle with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to stifle independence of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The story starts with the discovery of a collection of curious cracks in the structure of the world's air: gateways that seem to lead to alternate realities. One such window seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these openings as a problem to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from strict logic and back to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical conflict between innocence and knowledge is set.

Story Tempo and Character Development

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