When I began reading Dust, I felt like the book was trying to convince me to stop. Right from the start it feels less immediately gripping than its predecessors. Wool began with a character climbing to his death while children played around him. Shift showed us a man as he “returned to the land of the living and found himself inside a tomb.” Both of these were interesting plays on the idea of mortality, reflecting the greater theme of survival in their juxtaposition of life and death. Dust, however, treats us to digging. Lots and lots of digging.

As the final book in a trilogy, Dust assumes a certain amount of background knowledge from its readers. But the first few chapters seem to trade on that, on our connection with Juliette from the previous books, in lieu of being interesting in their own right. Perhaps we are supposed to be fascinated by the detailed descriptions of machinery and the mining process. While I appreciate that such detail shows that the characters know what they’re doing, it doesn’t make it any more comprehensible for a reader who’s barely picked up a wrench in his life.

Fortunately, Chapter 4 reintroduces a personal connection to Juliette, one that reinforces why she’s doing what she’s doing, what costs it will have, and crucially, why readers should care. The past events that the first few chapters glossed over suddenly felt real again. Reading on, I was relieved to find that this human element remained for the rest of the book.

Dust is told from multiple points of view, each one slightly unreliable as their knowledge of the world has been shaped by their particular circumstances. Elise’s chapters are some of the most interesting. Her charming childhood innocence and ignorance—such as her staunch belief that dogs and puppies are different animals—reflects the greater societal ignorance of how the world really is, most people not realising there is so much more to know than the tiny sliver they’ve seen.

If Dust has a core moral, it is that ill-informed action leads to ruin. The book expresses this in two ways: by showing the fallout and regret that follows from acting without all the information, and by setting up characters to take action that only we, the omniscient readers, can see is folly. The message is clear: ignorance breeds ignorance.

The combined ignorance and arrogance of silo society makes it feel just as alien and inhospitable to the reader as the outside world is claimed to be. Juliette’s dream of reclaiming the world above their dank underground silos seems to me like the natural thing to do, and I kept finding myself surprised at the amount of resistance she gets. What’s normal for me as the reader is unusual, even criminal in the sheltered, claustrophobic world of Dust, and I found myself grateful to have Juliette and the other protagonists on my side.

What really struck me about the silos’ people was their value system. In a post-apocalyptic setting, I expect things that I take for granted—such as blue sky and readily available food—to be mere fanciful myths to the characters, and they are. What I hadn’t expected was how little value they place on what I would consider their greatest treasures. Juliette sees the few remaining history books as valuable for the knowledge they possess, and worthy of preservation. Others, however, only see them as another source of recyclable paper or, in the case of the silo’s predominant religion, heretical filth to be burned. This religion’s fearmongering, brutal rituals and treatment of wives as property flies in contrast to the multiple strong female protagonists, showing how far humanity has regressed and underscoring the need for change.

Violence in Dust is rare and shocking. When it does occur it feels explosive, brutal and ugly. Few of the protagonists consider it as a solution to any problem, even when the death of another would aid in their own preservation. This could be either a reflection of the society’s relatively small population making life precious, or a clue to the author’s own values.

The plot really starts to pick up steam at the end of Part II, raising the stakes high enough to keep me gripped until the end. I have to say, I found the ending a bit too neat and tidy after the various hells these people had been through, but I suppose to finish with more troubles would have felt like a loose end. Speaking of which, the mystery of one of the silos is brought up in the book’s last few dozen pages, but is never explored further. I felt this could have been handled much better, especially as the parts of the mystery that frightened the characters seemed like boons to me.

Nonetheless, I found Dust to be a raw, mature exploration of human nature. Perhaps the opening chapters about digging are meant as a metaphor for the entire book. Reading it, I often felt like Juliette was a drill working alone in the deep, straining as she tried to force her way through fear, hatred, oppression and desperation, with tailings of love breaking off and being crushed in the process. Despite this morose summary, it never struck me as overly gloomy. A candle of hope always lit the drill’s way as it tunnelled toward salvation.