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Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and failing."

Key Puzzle and Her Quest

Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in beast form; where the skies are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and beverages is drunk, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

His choice to depart in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to expand the institution's dominium. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The extract is regarded by some as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.

Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world. Her individual journey to reconnect with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to stifle independence of reason, originality and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts

The book starts with the finding of a series of unusual cracks in the fabric of the world's air: portals that seem to open into different dimensions. One such portal manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its head, classifies these windows as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and back to feeling, yet, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.

Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution

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