Philip Pullman Confronts His Daemons in New York
By Diane Roback, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 11/1/2007
Philip Pullman doesn’t come to town very often, and when he does, crowds gather. This past Tuesday night fans of all ages filled the auditorium of the brand-new New York Times headquarters on Eighth Avenue, to hear the Carnegie Medalist speak about the His Dark Materials series, and the Golden Compass feature film, set for release on December 7. He spoke with NYT writer-at-large Chip McGrath about the nature of storytelling, his literary influences and the religious controversy surrounding his books and the film, among many other topics.
Each person has a story, according to Pullman, and that story begins the same way for all: “You find yourself in the wrong family by mistake. We’re all princes and princesses in exile,” he said. “Then we begin to discover the world around us.”
Pullman, in a rare New York appearance.
Photo: Matthew Arnold.
Pullman started out in life believing he would become a poet. He knew he “wanted to do something in the field of the arts,” but didn’t attempt writing a novel until he’d finished his studies at Oxford. At university, he discovered that he actually “wasn’t very good” at being a scholar, and instead became a schoolteacher, for kids ages 11–13, and taught for 12 years. In teaching, he said, he learned how to become a storyteller, beginning with telling stories to his classes, such as ancient myths, and The Iliad and The Odyssey. “I learned what sort of storyteller I was and wasn’t,” he said. “I couldn’t make them laugh, but I could describe a scene, build up suspense. That was my apprenticeship as a storyteller.”
He wrote many novels before turning to what became The Golden Compass, the first of the His Dark Materials books, a series that took seven years to complete. After attempting the first chapter “14 or 15 times,” Pullman said, “I found myself writing the words ‘Lyra and her daemon.’ It became clear that she had a daemon and went everywhere with it. The best idea I had was that it’s only children’s daemons that change forms, and then [when the child gets older] they settle down. That’s the real theme of the story: the difference between innocence and experience, in William Blake’s terms.”
When asked by McGrath if he conceived of the books as a trilogy, he said instead that he thought of it as one long story. “I knew it was going to be roughly between 1000 and 1200 pages,” he said. “When you’ve been writing a while, you know the size of an idea, and I knew it was a big thing.”
And since he knew he wanted the book to explore the themes of Milton’s Paradise Lost, he said, “having decided with my publishers that I was going to write Paradise Lost in 1200 words for young readers, I realized I had to write a fantasy.” The only problem: he didn’t particularly like writing fantasy. “What I was interested in was using the mechanisms of fantasy to say something interesting about us as human beings,” he said. “It was an awkward moment when I realized I was enjoying it—I was loving it! Maybe I should have been writing fantasy all along.”
 Pullman and moderator Chip McGrath. Photo: Matthew Arnold. |
Asking the author to address the religious controversy swirling over the books, McGrath made reference to an infamous column by conservative columnist Peter Hitchens, who labeled Pullman “the most dangerous author in Britain,” calling him the writer atheists would pray for, if atheists prayed. Pullman said he didn’t take Hitchens’s comments all that seriously—“This is a man who is obligated to be angry about something once a week.”
Pullman stated that he doesn’t write with any political or religious aim in mind; he writes to tell a story. “Religion is part of what makes us what we are,” he said, “by which I mean, a sense of wonder, mystery and awe. A questioning attitude—where do we go when we die? Religion is at its best when it is at its farthest from organized power. When religion acquires political power it goes bad.”
Much of the “fuss” about the books, he said, “comes from those who have not read them. Also those who read books in one way—literally. I much prefer the democracy of reading. I would much rather my readers come to my books with an open heart and mind. The space that opens up between the reader’s mind and the book is a private space. It’s an extraordinary process, this process of reading. I am very much against anyone dictating how my books should be read.”
Asked about whether it was difficult to surrender his books to a movie studio, Pullman commented, “It would have been foolish of me to insist on complete control.” He acknowledged that you can’t have the same control over the material that you have as a novelist, and said he felt fortunate that New Line Cinema has been “exceptionally generous and fair” with him. “They have consulted me at every stage.”
He seemed pleased to be asked by an audience member about his four Sally Lockhart novels, saying, “I’m very fond of those characters and I’m going to come back to them,” promising more books starring the Victorian heroine.
Another book set in the His Dark Materials world, called The Book of Dust, is coming “sometime not quite soon.” It’s a novel about Lyra, he said. “She’s a little older than at the end of The Amber Spyglass. It’s a different story, but she’s still interested in Dust.”
Dust, Pullman went on to clarify, “seems to be the objective scientific evidence of original sin. People are terribly afraid of it, and will do ghastly things to get rid of it.” Over the course of the books, he said, one comes to see a “huge moral reversal in Lyra, [who comes to believe that] maybe Dust is actually good, that it’s the embodiment of the world of consciousness, thought and feeling. We find out more as Lyra does. It seemed to me it was a very good metaphor—the scientific notion of dark matter.”
One of the biggest laughs of the evening came when an audience member asked about the character of Lee Scoresby, the Texan aeronaut, and where he had come from. “Like many things in my writing,” Pullman acknowledged, “I stole him.” He said he was a great fan of Westerns, and counted The Magnificent Seven as a big influence.
In fact, when subsequently asked what his own daemon would be if he had one, Pullman answered, “My daemon would be one of those birds that hangs about in trees at the edge of a village and steals things. Because that’s what storytellers do.”
