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Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are faltering and failing."

Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path

Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, transports are caught and drinks is drunk, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more careful, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

His choice to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by various factions as a tradeable good, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.

Like the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the original series, her movements and her fate are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her individual quest to reunite with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a larger war with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to quell freedom of thought, innovation and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.

Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts

The book starts with the unveiling of a series of curious openings in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: windows that look to lead to other worlds. A particular window seems to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, designates these windows as a problem to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid reason and revert to feeling, however, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their meaning and their value is in some way crucial – strengthens. "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 poetic tussle between purity and knowledge is prepared.

Plot Rhythm and Character Development

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