★★★★★ I enjoyed this book, as I have His Dark Materials and the first two volumes of the trilogy.
I must say that Philip Pullman came up with many wonderful ideas, and I'm thrilled by his streaks of Romanticism; the dying art of imagination; inspiration; the daemonic and other forgotten, rejected, or forbidden knowledge; the Secret Commonwealth of the "Otherworld"; heresy ("free thinking"); and, like J.R.R. Tolkien, his critique of capitalism and the love and corrupting influence of money and power.
I enjoyed what he has to say about imagination and consciousness, though I can't help but think that he was, even at the end of the books, still struggling to understand them, propped-up every now and again with important sounding authority borrowed from quantum physics. Of course, if we're the type who are interested in such matters, we're all pretty much feeling the elephant in the dark: one of us who feels its trunk declaring it a hose; another feeling its leg thinking it a stout pillar; a third feeling its ear and adamant it is a fan; and so forth.
When we read a work of inspired fantasy like this, of course we make a special point of switching off the mind's critical faculties and censors, so that we can entertain, enjoy and fully immerse ourselves in such a work. And so we can easily go along with even the most fantastical parts of a story, such as flying witches and gryphons. But even fantasy has its "rules", and in the odd place, the author slipped and proposed something implausible that "broke the spell", as it were. This perhaps happened more generally where the plot had been too predictable and the solution to a problem found too conveniently. But this also occasionally happened in specific parts of the text, not in the fantastic but in the more mundane, the most obvious being where one of the characters just happened to have in his pocket or otherwise secreted on his person a small and convenient object that for all practical purposes he would have had next to no interest in carrying with him; an object that really had negligible effect on the plot and that could have been written far more plausibly with a straightforward explanation and without the need for any subterfuge. For me, that had me scratching my chin and momentarily broke the spell.
As for the ending, it was satisfying in one way, and yet as others have noted, it did leave some loose ends and issues unresolved, which is pretty understandable with so much going on in the six books. In the final chapters of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, we have the hobbits returning to the Shire to find its been taken over by militant forces and nature being destroyed and replaced by filthy industry. This was left out of the films, perhaps because they thought it would seem anticlimactic. But something was lost from Tolkien's vision as well as from the films, in doing so. And, at least to my own mind, I am grateful to Philip Pullman for the ending he wrote and which, to his credit, as revealed in an interview, he had had to write and rewrite numerous times at the behest of his much-trusted editor. Unlike (say) JK Rowling who goes to great lengths to plan her work, I did wonder on several occasions whether Philip Pullman had instead been "winging it" (which is an equally valid and less left-brain approach), and for the most part, he ably pulled it off.
All in all, then, I found the work most enjoyable and easy-reading, and really appreciate the thought and care that went into the deeper, and much-needed, philosophy behind his works. So shines a good deed in a weary [and greatly troubled] world.