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Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are faltering and collapsing."

Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path

Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first introduced three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the skies are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are caught and drinks is consumed, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to go off in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his newfound authority to expand the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by various factions as a tradeable good, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.

Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the future of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe. Her private journey to reunite with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a broader battle with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes always have, is striving to stifle autonomy of reason, innovation and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The novel opens with the finding of a series of strange cracks in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. A particular window appears to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these windows as a problem to the church's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid logic and back to intuition, yet, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between innocence and experience is established.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

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