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Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are faltering and giving way."

Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey

Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in beast form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are ridden and tea is sipped, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the church's governing body, and is set on using his fresh influence to expand the church's control. Another protagonist, who carried infant the heroine to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by some as a marketable good, by others as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.

Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they merge. As in the original series, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably woven with the future of the universe. Her individual journey to reunite with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems always have, is striving to suppress freedom of thinking, innovation and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles

The book starts with the finding of a collection of strange fissures in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that seem to give on to alternate realities. One such portal appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these windows as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict logic and return to feeling, however, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is prepared.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

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