Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman’s magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force “is destroying the air and the seasons”; at the same time, “money’s going bad, and no one knows why”. Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. “Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly”, says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. “Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and giving way.”

Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman’s concluding foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It’s a realm whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and tea is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Pan’s decision to go off in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her “imagination”), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church’s governing authority, and Pullman’s deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra’s uncle, who blames her for his sister’s death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the Magisterium’s High Council, and is intent on using his newfound power to extend the church’s dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about Delamare’s intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which seems somehow to be the source of a social and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by some as a tradeable commodity, by others as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the fanatical “men from the mountains” – as a source of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra’s actions and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world. Her personal quest to reunite with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a wider war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to quell independence of thought, creativity and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.

The novel begins with the discovery of a series of curious fissures in the fabric of the Earth’s atmosphere: windows that seem to give on to other worlds. One such window appears to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, designates these windows as a challenge to the church’s orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, however, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow essential – grows. “Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it,” she says, “we need it.” The stage for a Blakean tussle between innocence and experience is set.

At 640 pages, The Rose Field gives itself the time it needs to bring Pullman’s trilogy to a fitting conclusion, but there are points when it seems to wend its way rather too circuitously to a close. Minor characters are on occasion introduced without definite purpose, and there are moments where apparent advances in the narrative turn out to be cul-de-sacs. But the story’s internal motor is strong enough to carry us over these digressions. Lyra’s journey into adulthood feels both painful and plausible and, once again, Pullman uses her relationship with her daemon to reify and explore her internal struggles in a manner that is unique to his imaginative universe. Malcolm is an unexpectedly successful replacement for Will, Lyra’s foil in the first trilogy: he is a rich, full character in his own right, and his feelings for Lyra, and hers for him, offer a complex, adult counterpoint to the relationship between Will and Lyra in His Dark Materials. Pullman’s uncanny ability to conjure place, meanwhile, is once again in full evidence: the snows of Svalbard and Oxford’s clutter of rooftops are exchanged for the Silk Roads’ sweeping deserts and soaring mountains. And when we reach it, the novel’s final showdown is a fantastically nail‑biting ride.

Endings, though, are always difficult, and for Pullman, the challenge is compounded by the fact that His Dark Materials delivered one of the most emotionally and intellectually satisfying conclusions in modern literature. In The Book of Dust, by contrast, there is a sense of threads left unknotted; ends only lightly tucked away. But this feels, in the final analysis, like an intentional choice on Pullman’s part: the ultimate reflection of the fact that The Book of Dust is a story for grownups, not children, and storybook endings are another casualty of the putting away of childish things. “There are no endings,” said Hilary Mantel on the final page of Bring Up the Bodies; “they are all beginnings.” Pullman draws his great matter to a close, but he’s clear that his characters, and their stories, will continue without him – that the end of his book marks the start of their next chapter. “We need the things we can’t explain, can’t prove, or else we die of suffocation,” says Lyra, towards the end of the novel. With The Book of Dust, Pullman has given us room to breathe.

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

Northern writers still face a struggle to make it in the London-centric literary world, the organisers of a regional literary prize have said.

Claire Malcolm, founder and chief executive of New Writing North, which runs the Northern Writers’ Awards, said: “It still doesn’t feel like a level playing field for the north. That is the continual thing we are trying to make the case for: talent here is still struggling to make connections, it needs investment.” The Northern Writers’ Awards, which will announce their 25th annual winners on Tuesday, was established in the late 1990s to discover and support new writing talent in the north of England, tackling disadvantages faced by writers who felt shut out by the publishing industry.

It has supported more than 400 northern writers with cash prizes, handing out £50,000 a year, and networking. Unlike most literary prizes, the awards support writers who have no agent representation and have not previously been published.

Success stories include Benjamin Myers, author of The Gallows Pole, which was adapted by Shane Meadows for BBC TV in 2023. Myers won a Northern Writers’ Award in 2013 for his novel Beastings, winning money and support to develop his work, leading to further awards and a publishing deal with Bloomsbury.

Despite his success, Malcolm recalled one literary editor saying Myers was “very northern and there probably wasn’t a market for that”. She said prejudices such as these are why the awards are still so important.

Andrew McMillan also won a Northern Writers’ Award in 2013 for his poetry, and his first collection, physical, went on to win the Guardian first book award. His first novel, Pity, was published earlier this year. On Tuesday he will announce the winner of a new prize, The Tempest prize, which he has established with New Writing North to find unpublished LGBTQ+ writers in the region.

“I liked the idea of finding stories that might come from places like Barnsley [where McMillan grew up], and other towns and villages in the north of England, where there are stories but we just haven’t heard them yet,” McMillan says. “The level of entries was remarkably high.”

The winner of the Tempest prize will receive mentoring with McMillan and support from New Writing North. “The writing world can seem really opaque,” says McMillan. “For writers who don’t have that access, it’s helpful to demystify it.”

Malcolm said the Conservative party’s Levelling Up agenda “has not levelled up culture at all … It’s been frustrating that money has not followed ambition.”

She added: “What the north needs are much bigger levers to make talent happen and to sustain a culture where you might not have to leave the north-east to work in publishing, because that industry will be here.”

Never in living memory has the north of England felt so far removed from the economic and political power base of London. That the most – the only? – prominent northern accent in the House of Commons currently belongs not to a sitting MP but to the speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, speaks volumes about the complete disenfranchisement of northern influence in how Britain is currently run.

Step forward then Andy Burnham, a one-time potential Labour party leader who wisely recognised that making significant change within Westminster is often a thwarted and thankless task, survivable only by the biggest egos or the borderline psychopathic. However, as mayor of Greater Manchester he has rolled up his sleeves and dug deep into local politics and community policy making, and consequently proven himself to be that increasingly rare breed in the 2020s: a genuinely popular politician. Some still consider him to be a possible future PM, and with Head North he certainly stakes a claim as an individual with a clear vision not yet jaded by three decades in the cesspit of politics.

For many northerners, arguably the only thing more annoying than a train infrastructure that no longer works is the fact that they are continuously compelled to defend their region; the chips that are carried on shoulders have been put there by circumstance rather than choice. Take, for example, the 2010-2015 coalition government’s “northern Powerhouse” proposal to boost the economy. In fact, by 2019, 200,000 more northern children were living in poverty as a result of £3.6bn in spending cuts (versus a spending increase of £4.7bn in the south-east and south-west). And as for HS2, Rishi Sunak cancelled the crucial phase 2, which would have speedily linked the north to London and an increasingly distant Europe beyond.

Joining forces with metro mayor of the Liverpool city region Steve Rotheram, who was born just three miles away from him, Burnham interrogates such examples of neglect towards the north while offering a clear plan to improve living standards.

Though from different backgrounds – Rotheram was one of eight children and a bricklayer, while Burnham was at Cambridge – the pair were both politicised by close proximity to the Hillsborough disaster of 1989, and the false narrative that depicted Liverpudlians as perpetrators in the same decade that this internationally minded city was being put into managed decline. Little wonder the pair bonded over their outsiders’ distrust of Westminster, and have no problem calling Thatcher “the devil incarnate” today.

They’re also quick to correct the common misconception that “pro-north” equals “anti-London”, not least because Burnham ascended during New Labour’s glory years; though after some persuasion from Rotheram, he broke from Blair/Brownite consensus to ultimately return north, with the pair occupying newly created mayoral roles in 2017. Burnham was in at the deep end when Manchester Arena was bombed 14 days after he came to office – he found out from a screaming Rotheram, whose daughters were there: “In an instant I had that same feeling I had in 1989… sick to the pit of my stomach,” Burnham says.

There’s certainly a street-level approachability to the pair that’s sorely lacking in today’s leadership; you can’t imagine anyone in Sunak’s cabinet publishing photos from their 1980s building site days and hanging out with Paul Weller, or citing the June Brides and Boys from the Blackstuff as influences.

Their vision for equality appears workable and deceptively simple, and includes the renationalisation of public transport networks, some long overdue TLC for the NHS and a restructured education system as the engine for social mobility. When the purse strings are held fast by careerists who worship only at the altar of free market capitalism, it still all looks an alarmingly steep uphill struggle. At least Burnham and Rotheram are already proven entities among their constituents, having done positive work in tackling homelessness, public transport issues and fighting Boris Johnson for furlough funding during Covid, despite their entire delegation being muted on governmental Zoom calls. “I could just smell the bullshit,” writes Rotheram, whose commitment to his city was evident in his attendance at more than 2,000 events in one year, when Liverpool was the EU-funded capital of culture.

Their tangential career narratives also suggest that if the likes of Johnson and Farage can trade on their contrived “man down the pub” personas, then Burnham and Rotheram should be afforded serious consideration by those who prefer their representatives to be present, and whose politics are born of experience rather than privilege.

Not since Tony Blair 30 years ago have politicians advocated for the north from a place of understanding, while also acknowledging that there is no actual single “north”, there are infinite versions, and to view it as a homogeneous left-leaning, working-class, cloth-capped entity would be the same reductive thinking that has fuelled 14 years of Conservative punishment beatings. Go to Rochdale, to Middlesbrough or Blackpool to witness such economic discrimination.

Overseen by journalist Liam Thorp, who brings brevity and order, Head North ultimately offers hope to the northern regions when it is most needed, and reminds us that those politicians who refuse to toe the party line are often those who history remembers most favourably.

Benjamin Myers’s most recent novel, Cuddy (Bloomsbury), won the 2023 Goldsmiths prize