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.

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Michael Sheen narrates The Rose Field

She washed herself as well as she could in the little basin with its lukewarm water, and looked in the mirror dispassionately. The bruises on her face were fading, but she was tanned by the sun, and her cheeks and the bridge of her nose not far off from being actually burnt, so she must find some cream or ointment to deal with that. A broad-brimmed hat would help too.

She spread a very little of the rose salve on her nose and lips, her cheekbones and forehead. Then she sat down and thought about Ionides.

He’d been very helpful so far, but could she trust him any further? This part of the world was completely new to her, whereas Ionides was at home with the languages here, and the customs, and the modes of travel. Could she manage without his guidance? She could probably afford it. She still had most of the gold that Farder Coram had given her. Ionides hadn’t let her down yet, and besides, she liked him.

The man at Marletto’s, this Mustafa Bey whom Bud Schlesinger had recommended. She didn’t know what to do. The alethiometer would have helped her decide, of course; even without the books, and without risking the sickness and disorientation of the new method, she’d have gained something from it; her knowledge of the symbols was much greater than it had been, and just to hold it would have given her thoughts something to focus on. And now it was gone.

But she still had the glass, and the needle. If she didn’t find something safe to keep them in, though, she might not have them for long. The glass was merely a glass (she supposed), but the needle . . . She took it very carefully out of the pocket it was in, and laid it in the centre of a piece of scrap paper, which she folded over and over till the needle couldn’t slip out, and put it in a compartment of her rucksack.

Then she thought of the old gentleman on the train, and the cards he’d given her. She took out the pack and shuffled it and spread the cards face down on the bed beside her. Now what could she do? The alethiometer worked by blending the meanings of three symbols. Should she pick three cards? Or just one? Or what?

She chose one and turned it over. It showed a man behind a barricade trying to defend it from a group of soldiers, against a background of gunfire and bursting shells. She looked at it despondently for a minute or so, and gathered the cards together again.

---

Ionides sprang to his feet as soon as he saw her come downstairs.

‘Miss Silver! Now I am your guide and guardian for the journey to Marletto’s Café. May I ask if you are hoping to see the well-known and respected Mustafa Bey?’

‘How did you know that?’

‘It was a guess purely and entirely. A traveller of your consequence would of course wish to pay her respects to such an important gentleman, and Marletto’s is where he is to be found. It is as good as a headquarters for his multitude of enterprises.’

He held open the hotel door and walked along beside her with the air of a senior courtier accompanying a princess. He looked no different from the ragged and none-too-clean individual who had first appeared outside her hotel room in Seleukeia, but he bore himself with such confidence and brio that Lyra felt herself to be acting a part too, and enjoying the attention of other passersby. Most of those who looked at her were disconcerted, of course, by her lack of a dæmon, but she remembered the woman she’d seen in Amsterdam, strolling along magnificently indifferent to the hostile stares of other people, and she remembered Farder Coram’s advice too, to bear herself like a queen.

‘Mr Ionides,’ she said.

‘I am all ears,’ he declared.

‘From now on my name is Tatiana Iorekova. I am a queen of the witches of Novaya Zemlya. You are a magician from Prague, and you are in my service.’

‘Ah! I completely understand. This is how I shall present you to Mustafa Bey, no?’

‘That’s correct.’

‘And what is my name?’

‘Magister Parathanasius.’

‘Parathanasius. A fine name, which I shall strive to deserve. How should I address you, Queen Tatiana?’

‘Like that. Say Queen Tatiana, may I present His Excellency Mustafa Bey?’

‘Not “Your Majesty”?’

‘No. We witches live plainly and without ceremony. Ah! – Wait here.’ She had noticed something in the window of a dress shop, and went inside. After a minute she came out with a length of narrow scarlet ribbon.

‘That for me or for you?’ said Ionides.

She smiled, which surprised him, and it occurred to her that she couldn’t remember the last time a smile had come to her face. She tied the ribbon around her head, across the middle of her brow, and let the ends fall in front of her right ear.

Ionides watched critically, and said, ‘You permit?’

She nodded, and he adjusted the ribbon slightly.

‘There. Very royal. What my name again?’

‘Parathanasius. Magister. Like Maestro. Master Parathanasius.’

‘From Prague.’

‘That’s right.’

He looked around. The street was busy; it was a late morning in a prosperous cosmopolitan city, and no one knew they were in the presence of a queen and a magician.

‘All right, Queen Tatiana Iorekova,’ he said seriously. ‘You wanted me to guide you to Aleppo. Here we are, and you will soon pay me forty dollars–’

‘Thirty.’

‘As you say. When I take you to Mustafa Bey our contract will expire, not so?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And what then? The whole of Asia is open to you. What is your destination? Will you require a guide to accompany you there?’

She had already made her mind up, but there were formalities and customs to observe.

‘Master Parathanasius, this is not the right place nor the right time. A queen of the witches does not bargain in the street. When I have concluded my business with Mustafa Bey, you and I shall go to another smaller café and discuss the matters you raise over a glass of tea.’

He nodded slowly. His expression was serious, his clothing ragged and dirty, the scar across his face white against the brown skin and the greying stubble. He looked like a beggar. But he stood upright, his body was lean and tense, and his eyes were alive with complicity and, deep inside, amusement.

‘All right, we go to find Mustafa Bey,’ he said. ‘You come with me, Queen Tatiana, and my magic powers find the way.’

He strode along beside her for all the world as if he really was a magician in the service of a queen. Lyra was pleased with her own bearing too. Like panthers, that was the way Farder Coram had described the way witches bore themselves. She found herself thinking something unexpected: she wanted Abdel Ionides to feel proud of her.

He swept imperiously into the entrance of Marletto’s, stopping in mock astonishment only when a white-aproned waiter said a few words in French, sharply, and barred his way.

‘Vous nous prenez pour des MENDIANTS?’ Ionides said in high indignation. ‘Écoutez, espèce d’imbécile. Voici sa majesté la reine Tatiana Iorekova, qui gouverne le royaume entier de Novaya Zemlya, et moi qui suis son sorcier particulier, le gardien de ses finances, le président de conseil de ses affaires d’état, le Maître Parathanasius! Queen Tatiana,’ he went on, turning to Lyra and switching in a moment from arrogant to emollient. ‘I apologise for the ignorance of this low-born rascal. Please forgive him, because now he knows who you are, he will hasten to bring you everything you desire, and conduct us without delay to a corner of this establishment which is fit to receive us. ‘And,’ he added to the waiter, ‘take word to His Excellency Mustafa Bey that Queen Tatiana Iorekova will receive him at once.’

The waiter looked from Ionides to Lyra, from Queen Tatiana to Master Parathanasius. Ionides was bursting with angry pride, and Lyra held herself still and faced down the waiter with a gaze that came from the coldest fastnesses of the northern ice. Privately she was delighted.

The waiter bowed nervously and led the way to a corner shaded by a potted palm whose leaves waved delicately in the breeze from a fan on the ceiling. Ionides held out a chair for her while the waiter hastened away.

‘When you’ve presented him to me, you can go,’ Lyra said quietly. ‘I saw a fountain in the square as we came through. I’ll meet you there in about an hour.’

‘You don’t need interpreter?’

‘I’m sure I can manage. Here he comes.’

Mustafa Bey was a large man in a physical sense, and an imposing one. His wealth was visible in the exquisitely cut cream linen suit, the hand-made shoes, the massive gold watch on his wrist, the golden signet ring on his little finger, the immaculately groomed grey hair; his power was manifest in the way he seemed to carry a field of magnetic force around him, compelling attention, demanding respect, knowing with utter certainty that his every wish would be not only fulfilled, but anticipated. His dæmon was a cheetah. If Lyra had not been a queen, she might even have been intimidated.

Ionides inclined his head briefly and said, ‘Queen Tatiana, may I present His Excellency Mustafa Bey?’

Lyra extended her right hand. The great merchant bent to kiss it, and Lyra responded with a smile.

‘Please join me, Mustafa Bey,’ she said. ‘I know how busy you are. I would be grateful for a few minutes of your time.’

She indicated a chair, and Mustafa Bey sat down. Ionides was giving an order to the waiter, who hurried away, and then Master Parathanasius bowed deeply to Lyra and withdrew. Mustafa Bey still had not said a word.

‘I was advised to consult you,’ Queen Tatiana said, ‘by a learned scholar in Oxford, Doctor Sebastian Makepeace.’

The merchant’s large and profoundly dark eyes widened a fraction of a millimetre. His expression changed from one unreadability to another.

‘And there was a friend I last saw in Smyrna,’ she went on, ‘who said that the one source of all the information I would ever need on my journey was Mustafa Bey, whom I would find in this café. One such recommendation would have been enough to make me come here – two, and I had no choice. Mustafa Bey, I am glad to meet you. Will you take tea with me?’

She could see the waiter hastening to her table with a loaded tray.

‘I would be honoured,’ said the merchant. His voice was unexpectedly light and gentle.

The tea was poured, the pastries were set out, the waiter bowed and left.

Mustafa Bey was not going to start this conversation. He was a busy man, but he was clearly curious, and Lyra was aware that they were being watched by many eyes that were equally interested. She was glad she had not come to him as a petitioner, having to wait to be seen: this table gave her a little enclave in the middle of his territory, like an embassy, where she could command things, to which she could summon him, from which she could dictate the course of their encounter. It also meant that the initiative belonged to her: she must get on with it.

‘As I mentioned, Mustafa Bey,’ she said, ‘I’m on a journey. I want to travel to the desert of Karamakan, and I would like to ask the advice of someone who knows the Silk Roads as well as anyone alive.’

‘My advice would be a single word: Don’t.’

‘I shall bear that in mind, but I won’t take it. I’m determined to go.’

‘What do you think you will find there?’

‘A red building that contains something of immense value.’

‘And what is that? Do you know what is in this red building?’

‘Yes, I believe I do.’

‘And you still want to go there, and put your life in danger, and risk not being able to return?’

‘Yes.’

He sipped the hot tea. Despite his bulk, all his movements were delicate and graceful.

‘I have never been to the red building myself,’ he said, ‘but I know the conditions under which it must be approached. The traveller by land, the dæmon by water. Do you?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘And your dæmon?’

‘The witches of the Arctic have the power of separation. At the moment, my dæmon is attending to an important piece of business somewhere else.’

He nodded, and set a calming hand on the head of his cheetah-dæmon. ‘And what do you need to know about the journey between here and Karamakan?’

‘How long does it take for a camel-train to go that far?’

‘Six months, more or less.’

‘And a traveller alone?’

‘Less time, but more danger.’

‘Danger from what, Mustafa Bey?’

‘Bandits on the ground. And even more from birds in the air. There are no zeppelin routes across these lands for that reason. The birds are immense and ferocious. They command the air almost entirely. Do your people ever fly across Central Asia?’

‘Very seldom.’

‘With good reason. But, Queen Tatiana, you are not telling me the truth.’

Lyra was aware of a deep soft growl, almost too quiet to hear. It was the merchant’s dæmon, whose black-rimmed eyes were staring at her throat.

‘In what way?’ said Lyra. Her skin was prickling.

‘You are not a witch. I have dealt with many witches – please do not interrupt me – and you are not one.’

‘Could you tell at once?’

‘No. I had to listen to you first. Now I am certain. Your name is Lyra Silvertongue.’

• The Rose Field: The Book of Dust Volume Three will be published in hardback, trade paperback, ebook and audiobook – narrated by Michael Sheen – on 23 October by David Fickling Books in association with Penguin Random House in the UK, featuring illustrations from Chris Wormell. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

Two poems from At the Dimensional Border

In our battle to be rational, we posit,
based on three points, a plane, and say it extends
— not knowing whether the universe is finite
or infinite — indefinitely. Heady
with the notions the brain entertains, the liberties
it takes. The brain with our lightweight priceless belongings
suitable for starting a home, a world
packed in the suitcase of our cranium.

As far and farther than the eye can see,
the plane extends, with no transcendence or end,
and the crafty stick-figure Odysseus who long
ago set off to battle foes in a fabulous
Ilium … will he ever arrive at the war, or home?

---

The stick-figure soldier with stick submachine gun shooting
lethal lines across the plane of a page
frozen in a never-ending battle will never
remember he was drawn by the hand of a child
who pencilled him in as indispensable and
disposable — a fragment of the adult
he wasn’t or one of a platoon of saviors
whose fate he could play with? If I, looking now,
at that child, could draw an imaginary line
from me to him and down to that infantryman,
the scarring graphite might fade to a ceasefire,
the paper re-embracing the bitter traces
back into the white weave of genesis.

Using Euclid’s Elements as “metaphorical guide”, Philip Fried began writing his 19-poem series, At the Dimensional Border, while experiencing what he describes as “the flattening effect” of the Covid-19 pandemic. The New York-based writer and editor also drew on memories of reading, as a teenager, Flatlands: a Romance of Many Dimensions a novella published by Edwin A Abbot in 1884, expressing in a rather subterranean manner the schoolmaster-writer’s ambition to satirise Victorian culture. I’ve chosen two poems from Fried’s series (not adjacent in the original text) which illuminate from different angles various further border-crossings in the primary landscape of “the border between the second and third dimensions”.

The definition of “plane” as “a flat surface that extends into infinity” is a useful entry into the first poem. Our “battle to be rational”, it suggests, is undermined if we inhabitants of the universe don’t know if the latter is finite or infinite. It’s significant that the attainment of rationality is seen as a “battle”: the poem moves along its own plane from the perfect poise of geometry to the human brain, “heady” with “the notions” that it entertains and, implicitly, is entertained by. The impudence and zest of “taking liberties” will land the poem in a mythical dimension, but first there’s a touching portrayal of our organic set of possibilities and limitations: “the brain with our lightweight priceless belongings / suitable for starting a home, a world / packed in the suitcase of our cranium.”

Like all the poems in the series, this is a 13-line, “not-quite-sonnet” but signals the form it echoes with a stanza break and a nicely positioned “turn” after the eighth. line. The traveller on the journey suggested earlier turns out to be Odysseus, now a two-dimensional “crafty stick-figure”, in contrast to the imagined three-dimensional plenitude of the “fabulous Ilium” but the direction of his travel is uncertain. Playing on the contradictory word-marriage of “end” with “transcendence” as, earlier, on “finite” and “indefinitely,” Fried questions if the traveller’s destinations – “war” or “home” – will ever be attainable.

The second poem traces the line back from its speaker to the pencil drawing of “the stick-figure soldier” he made as a child. The soldier, whose image is somehow frighteningly life-like as he shoots “lethal lines across the plane of a page”, is only a “fragment” from the child’s possible adulthood. He doesn’t belong, either, to the child’s “platoon of saviors” – toy figures, perhaps, of the comic-book heroes he writes about elsewhere, such as Wolverine and Batman. The soldier is revisited only for the speaker to consider the possibility of bringing about his extinction. The turn is elegantly registered, as in the previous poem, this time with a shift between uncertainties, from the interrogative to the subjunctive. If the adult now could draw “an imaginary line” to the child and then to the infantryman, it seems that the latter could be erased altogether, transformed from the “indispensable” to the “disposable”. This seems to suggest a radical re-imagination of masculinity that surpasses “ceasefire” and leads to a delicately but insistently rhymed possibility of disappearance and re-creation, “the paper re-embracing the bitter traces / back into the white weave of genesis.”

This poem is a particularly fine example of Fried’s ability to render large events on a small scale and reveal their significance in the granular detail. Read as anti-war writing, it evokes the limits of what might be called war’s moral two-dimensionalism. And it recalls the opening poem of the series, in which the “stick-figure philosopher” understands, in a “vision / of apocalypse” which includes “a mass migration upending hereness and thereness”, that “the faceless are the foundation we need not explain.”

You can read the complete series of poems in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, an innovative publication that includes fiction and poetry alongside discussion about maths. The sequence will form the final section of Fried’s new collection, untethered voices, forthcoming from Salmon Press.

Philip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, has joined fellow celebrated British writers Michael Morpurgo and Julia Donaldson this weekend in calling on government to legislate immediately to ensure all schools in Britain have libraries.

“The school library is absolutely essential at every level of education, and it needs legal protection and status,” said Pullman. “It is too easy to think that books and reading for pleasure are not essential, whereas nothing is more certain to improve children’s ability – and desire – to read richly and well.

“It’s also been too easy for some school heads to downgrade the school library into some sort of ‘information centre’, with the focus on computers and technology rather than books.”

Earlier this month former children’s laureate Donaldson, the author of The Gruffalo and many other popular stories for youngsters, made this campaign a key element in her BBC Radio 4 Analysis programme about the reading crisis among British children. If not enforced by law, the provision of a school library, she said, should at least now become part of an Ofsted evaluation.

Data produced last year revealed a falling number of secondary schools with libraries, while 14% of primary schools indicated having no library.

Donaldson went on to point out that while British prisons are legally required to have a library, some of the next generation of schoolchildren are going without.

Her words were echoed last week by Morpurgo, another former children’s laureate and the author of War Horse. He called for a new law when he was interviewed on Radio 4 about a related campaign to encourage parents and carers to lay the groundwork by reading stories to their children at bedtime. The writer emphasised that reading was not just important for improving academic attainment, but for its own sake.

The joint plea by the celebrated authors comes as new Manchester University research is published this weekend showing that reading comics and graphic novels can be a crucial introduction to books.

One of Pullman’s series of comics, The Phoenix, was given to north Manchester schoolchildren as part of a two-year project funded by Comic Art Europe, a pilot scheme bringing together four European organisations representing different elements of the comic book sector, and commissioned by the Lakes International Comic arts festival in Bowness-on-Windermere, Cumbria.

The festival’s research found “the number of children who listed reading as one of their favourite leisure activities doubled in the intervention group, while it reduced in popularity among the comparison group”.

Researchers worked with year 3 and year 4 pupils at north Manchester’s Abraham Moss community school, which has a large proportion of pupils from ethnic minority backgrounds and a higher than average number of economically disadvantaged students.

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Last September a National Literacy Trust report revealed that more than 56% of eight to 18-year-olds do not enjoy reading in their free time – a record low. And levels of reading enjoyment were weakest for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. This is despite recent evidence that an interest in books is a significant determinant of future achievements and salary levels.

“The school library is without question the most important room in the entire school, because it contains – or used to contain, or should contain – books that are not required for examination purposes,” said Pullman. “Books that no one might expect to find. Books on every subject under the sun. Books that some teachers don’t even know are there.”

Pullman said that he had kept an American poetry anthology “out of the hands of the elderly librarian at my secondary school in Harlech, north Wales, for example, because I worried that she might be damaged by Allen Ginsberg’s Howl”.

Pullman added that he visited Michael Gove when he was education secretary to make the argument for action. “He thanked me courteously and took no notice whatsoever,” Pullman said.

“But the library should be the heart, the soul, the mind, the source, the spring, the gold-bearing seam, the engine room, the treasure chamber, the priceless inheritance, the joy and the pride of the school. Every school.”

You might think, with the completion of the Human Genome Project 20 years ago now, and the discovery of the double helix enjoying its 70th birthday this year, that we actually know how life works. In physics, the quest for a so-called Grand Unifying Theory has preoccupied the most ambitious minds for generations, alas to no avail. But in the life sciences, we managed to find four grand unifying theories in the space of 100 years or so. Three are well known: cell theory – all life is made of cells, which only come from existing cells; Darwin’s evolution by natural selection; and universal genetics – all life is encoded by a cypher written in the molecule DNA. The fourth, no less important, goes by the chewy name chemiosmosis, and describes the way that all living things live by drawing fuel from their surroundings and using it in a continuous chemical reaction. In summary, life, made of cells that extract energy from their environment, comes modified from what came before. Job done; suck it, physicists!

However, biology is messy, and though we have these laws in place to describe all life on Earth, people like me remain gainfully employed because our understanding of how chemistry becomes biology is far, far from complete. These grand unifying ideas are unbeatable, but they lack detail, and in biology the devil lies at a molecular level of complexity that is hard to understand. Nowhere, as Philip Ball (a physicist by background) points out in his excellent new book, was this more starkly apparent than when an invisible virus turned the world upside down in 2020, killing millions, infecting many more. But while for some people it was lethal, or created myriad symptoms that would last for months or even years, for others it was akin to a mild cold, or even entirely symptomless. We do not know why this was the case.

How Life Works is a much more appealing title than the rather overused question of “what is life?” that was the one given to a series of influential lectures and an accompanying book in 1944 by Erwin Schrödinger – more famous for his hypothetical box containing a non-committal quantum cat – and ever since, this question has been borrowed by many wishing to seem profound. I find it largely pointless, and somewhat antithetical to scientific thought itself. We should be less concerned with what a thing is, and rather more focused on what a thing does. To define a living thing is a kind of creationist question, for it implies an immutable ideal type, but this runs counter to one of our grand unifying laws: the Darwinian principle that living things are four-dimensional, ever changing in time as well as space.

But it’s an idea that is deeply embedded within our culture: a vital force, the spark of life, an elusive but essential quality that distinguishes the quick and the dead. What is life? Tricky to pin down, but we know it when we see it, to paraphrase US Justice Potter Stewart in 1964 (admittedly, he was referring to an intangible definition of pornography).

Ball points out that we rely on metaphors and analogies to explain and explore the wicked complexities of life, but none suffice. We are taught that cells are machines, though no machine we have invented behaves like the simplest cell; that DNA is a code or a blueprint, though it is neither; that the brain is a computer, though no computer behaves like a brain at all.

It’s a funny thing that we strive to reduce the most complex entities in the known universe – living things – to a simple description. We crave narrative satisfaction in untangling systems, but evolution has a 4bn-year head start on us, and had no plan, nor any concession to ever being understood by one of its clever fruits. James Watson, half of the pair who published the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, once wrote that the other half, Francis Crick, had burst into the Eagle pub in Cambridge and declared that they had discovered the “secret of life” (though in 2017 Watson himself admitted that he’d invented the whole scene for dramatic effect). Ball points out that we don’t try to do this with art, or other matters of extreme beauty: no reader or scholar tries to isolate and distil the “secret of Dickens”.

These simplifications and analogies arise because it’s not good enough to simply deploy the condescending mantra “it’s a bit more complicated than that” and expect students not to be overwhelmed and bored. But Ball wonders if the models we use in our teaching reduce complexity without acknowledging that it’s there, as if we are trying to get that complexity out of the way so we never have to think about biology again. I am reminded of a better mantra, that of the statistician George Box: all models are wrong, but some are useful.

Ball builds a nice analogy with language, as we often do in genetics. How do you get from the dictionary to literature he asks? Well, it’s something like: words (+magic) > sentences (+magic) > chapters and books. The equivalent in a living organism is: genes (+magic) > proteins (+magic) > cells (+magic) > tissues and bodies.

Except of course the magic is not supernatural, it’s just the stuff that we don’t yet know, or can’t explain simply, which is the meat of how life works. The book follows the flowchart: there’s an exploration of the fundamentals of genetics, of how the way we teach and think about genes is not reflected in what geneticists know. There are no specific genes for complex human traits or behaviours, yet this misconception – often deployed in headlines as “Scientists discover the gene for … ” – is culturally embedded. Emerging evidence suggests that the way we teach genetics to children reinforces not only this error, but a version of racial essentialism long abandoned by science.

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Ball scales up from genes to proteins, and cells and networks, and in doing so we get stuck into the unexplored magic that gets us from chemistry to biology, all the while dismissing the egregious idea of nature v nurture: “I cannot stress enough,” he intones, “life works at all only in relation to its environment.”

Ball is a terrific writer, pumping out books on incredibly diverse subjects at a rate that makes me feel jealous and inadequate. There’s a wealth of well-researched information in here, some details that are a bit chewy for the lay reader, and I question the utility of black-and-white illustrations of proteins that are unrevealingly complex and thus unenlightening. But other than that, the book serves as an essential primer on our never-ending quest to understand life. Ultimately, “what is life?” is a question without a useful answer. “How does life work?” is the question that should drive the next wave of aspiring biologists from the cradle to the grave.