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Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are weakening and failing."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are taken and tea is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, warier, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

Pan's decision to depart in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired power to extend the religion's rule. A key character, who carried young the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to learn more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which seems in some way to be the source of a social and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.

As in the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the universe

In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her fate are shown to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her individual quest to reconnect with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a wider conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of thought, creativity and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles

The book opens with the discovery of a collection of unusual fissures in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that seem to give on to other worlds. A particular opening appears to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its helm, labels these windows as a problem to the institution's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible reason and back to intuition, however, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is somehow vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between purity and experience is prepared.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

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