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Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and giving way."

The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey

Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's concluding foray into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and tea is drunk, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to leave in quest of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to broaden the religion's control. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames 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 learn more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.

As in the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Similar to the original series, her choices and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the fate of the world. Her private mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a wider battle with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to stifle freedom of thought, originality and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The book begins with the finding of a set of unusual cracks in the structure of the world's air: gateways that seem to lead to other worlds. A particular window manifests to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its helm, labels these windows as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid logic and return to intuition, yet, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way essential – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean tussle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.

Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution

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