09
Philip Pullman
.. I' m not
saying that CS Lewis is promoting suicide bombing, but that continuum between the fanatical zeal of the people who did that terrible York and the caged mind of a calm, rational, traditional old scholarly tleman, sitting in his Oxford study. saying that children are better off from Milton's Paradise Lost. Pullman is one of those rare breed who do not feel the need to patronise children. Indeed the concept of the trilogy, which took eight years to write, is one that philosophers would not be embarrassed to have thought up. The three books deal with the fall of man, assert that God was just another angel and that the universe lies in the hands of one young girl, Lyra. Not your average children's book by any means. He is also not afraid to quote Slake, Milton and the Bible. "I quote them because they were saying things in those quotations which sustained me during the writing of the story and resonate most strongly and powerfully with things that I happen to believe." One of the things that Pullman believes in is atheism. Despite his grandfather being a vicar (who, incidentally, was situated in Norwich) and attending church every Sunday, Pullman decided in his teens that God didn't exist. "The whole business about death and what happens after it is a terribly difficult area for those of us who don't believe in God because we have to contend with, and deal with, the deaths of those who we love and the deaths of children and so on, and how do we deal with it?" Declining to answer his question, Pullman has a stab at it. ·we can't just say 'oh well, you die and that's the end of you', but on the other hand, I do feel quite passionately that I want to counter this notion that we can escape this life by going to heaven." And he does just that in The Amber Spyglass, portraying death as a prison camp filled with the ghosts of people who disobeyed The Authority by listening to the rebel angels. But there is an escape route, as he explains, "If you go down there and tell the harpies, who guard the dead, your story and if you bring them news of the world, tell them what the world is like, physically, what it's like to feel the wind on your face, the taste of a fresh apple in your mouth, if you live your life when you're alive, if you fully engage with it physically and emotionally and sensually and sexually and in every other way, then, if you tell this story you can come back alive again, you can JOin the world of the living and come out in the sunshine and the air. We know that our atoms fall apart and we go up into the grass and the sky with the birds and that's also true emotionally: we would like to go on living." Focusing on the rather morbid topic of death and of religion, I mention CS Lewis. Pullman has created rather a st1r in the literary world, describing Lewis' work as a "Blasphemy against life". As soon as I say this, he becomes animated. Clearly it's an issue that he's incredibly passionate about. "I detest his books. the Narnia books in particular because I think that they are propaganda on behalf of a religion which I detest, which I despise. " Many critics have drawn comparisons with the resurrection of Christ and the rebirth of the lion king, Asian, but that's usually where the comparison ends. Pullman goes further. "He says at various points that the world we live in is only a shadow of something much better somewhere else. This is exactly the cast of mind that lies behind suicide bombers, they think
they're going to paradise and then they're quite happy to fly a bomb Into the side of a building. I'm not saying that CS Lewis is promoting suicide bombing, but that there is a cast of mind, a continuum between the fanatical zeal of the people who did that terrible thing in New York and the caged mind of a calm, rational, traditional old scholarly English gentleman, sitting in his Oxford study, saying that children are better off dead." I am about to remind Pullman that he too went to Oxford and was a lecturer there for some time but I feel that he wouldn't appreciate the interruption. "If you read The Last Battle, which is the final one, it ends with all the children who have been through all these extraordinary adventures being given the greatest possible reward that they can be given, which is to be killed in a railway accident and go to heaven. So instead of living their lives on this earth, making it better for other people, they are whisked away. " Thinking that a change of subject is in order, I move on to discuss Pullman's travelling as a child. But even this is linked to death as his father, an RAF pilot, died in a plane crash when he was still a child. Nevertheless, I ask Pullman whether he feels this travelling helped with the settings for his books. "it may have served as a starting point for some of what I wrote about, but not everything, I've never been to the North, for example. You just have to make it up, do all the research that you can, and then just make it up." And this is exactly what Pullman has done. Set in six universes, his trilogy describes animals and places that require the most original of minds to construct . His characters vary from elephant-like animals that use giant seedpods as wheels, tiny spies who ride on the backs of dragonflies and armoured polar bears that rule the North. But perhaps the most unusual feature is Pullman's idea of a 'daemon', a human's soul personified as an animal. Pullman admits that many of these ideas come from past experiences. There is one instance which sticks in his mind and that is a trip to the zoo with his children. They are observing the monkeys and a little bird flies down near the cage. Immediately a hand whips out between the bars and snatches it. The monkey then proceeds to tear the bird apart, whilst Pullman and his children watch . "I didn 't know what to make of that and I still don't " explains Pullman. "You see the monkey wasn't killing the bird to eat it, he was just curious, yet I felt I'd experienced something ev11." Pullman stored this vision up and placed it in The Amber Spyglass, only with the monkey becoming golden and the bird becoming a bat . Pullman admits that he observes life through the eyes of a writer and loves being alive. Another thing he loves, oddly enough, is perhaps not something you would expect of him: Neighbours. "I'm out of touch with Neighbours at the moment" he moans, so I proceed, in great length, to ;nform him of all that's been happening. He's especially interested in the Tess, Darcy and Dione saga. "Oh wonderful, well it's fascinating. I've been watching that develop and it's a variation on a very
there is a thing in New English gendead."
ancient pattern, the eternal triangle pattern as a lot of things are in Neighbours. Dione should have dropped a dish of gravy and carrots over Darcy's head, though! And Joel and Dione, eh? Well you could see that coming, couldn't you? Because Joel was getting a bit cool towards Flick, wasn't he?" lt becomes clear when discussing the highly sophisticated plots for which Neighbours is renowned, that there are two sides to Pullman: the serious intellectual who is passionate and opinionated about literature and life, and the normal, everyday man, who likes to watch trashy TV, flick the end of his ruler and lean his chair back on two legs. Such habits have something to do with his disdain for the National Curriculum and its attitude towards teaching English. "They tell you to plan for 15 minutes and write for 45 and that's just utterly stupid. I think there's a continuum between what I do as a novelist and what children do when they're writing stories." Finally, I wonder what Pullman's life holds for him in the future, now that he's in his prime. He mentions that there's talk of a film being made of Dark Materials but that it won't be for a few years yet. He also hopes to illustrate his own picture book one day. Clearly, life for him is still very much about living. Pullman once declared, "Stories are the most important thing in the world . Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all." Some writers merely write stories- Pullman tells them. One day he should tell his own.
Pullman's Past: Born in 1946, Pullman attended Exeter College, Oxford, to read English. He worked at various middle schools for twelve years and was a part-time lecturer at Oxford. He's the author of numerous books and has been nominated for and won enough prizes to gain him a place as one of best children's authors of our time. His most notable novels are: • The Ruby in the Smoke, winner of the International Reading Association Children's Book Award, in 1988. Shadow in the North, shortlisted for the Edgar All an Poe Award. • The Tiger in the Well, shortlisted for Guardian Children's Fiction Award in 1992. • Northern Lights, won The Guardian Children's Fiction Award, the Carnegie Medal, and was selected as Children's Book of the Year in the British Book Awards in 1996. • Clockwork was shortlisted for Whitbread Children's Book of the Year, in 1997. • The Amber Spyglass, got onto the longlist for The Booker Prize this year. • Pullman's most famous work is his Dark Materials Trilogy; Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass (pictured above). Future books will include one on Dust, as discussed in Dark Materials and possibly a picture book, illustrated by himself.
Wednesday. October 17, 2001
eMent