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Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen 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 pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are weakening and collapsing."

Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey

Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and determined main character of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

Pan's decision to go off in quest of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound power to expand the church's control. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which appears somehow to be the source of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable good, by different parties as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.

Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe

In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the original series, the protagonist's choices and her path are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm. Her private quest to reunite with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a wider conflict with an oppressive government which, as these systems always have, is attempting to stifle freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The novel begins with the finding of a collection of unusual openings in the makeup of the planet's sky: gateways that seem to give on to other worlds. An example of a opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict logic and revert to instinct, yet, her belief that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical struggle between purity and maturity is established.

Story Tempo and Character Development

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