It feels like a long time since the final volume in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, but when you think about what the writer has to achieve with a follow-up – the recreation of Lyra Belacqua’s alternate universe, the scientific investigation of the strange matter known as “dust”, the genesis of totalitarian regimes and the answer to the question of what happens when God dies – 17 years is nothing.
The first instalment of The Book of Dust will be out in October and stands alongside Pullman’s epic first trilogy. Pullman has said it will begin and end with Lyra, the heroine of the previous books, and will feature other familiar characters. Speaking this week on Radio 4’s Today programme, he said the story reflected the vision of William Blake; “his idea of a fiercely reductive way of seeing things: it’s right or wrong; it’s black or white. He said that was far too limiting and we should bring out truer human vision when we see things, surround them all with a sort of penumbra of imagination and memories and hopes and expectations and fears and all these things. It’s an attack on the reductionism, the merciless reductionism, of doctrines with a single answer.”
People have been quick to suggest the trilogy will speak to the current climate of polarised opinion, the rise of fascistic regimes and religious zealotry, all areas Pullman has gone before. They just feel more vital now. There seem to be more enemies – bigger, more powerful authorities – than there were in the mid 90s when Northern Lights, his first in the trilogy, came out. But if all that sounds heavy, Pullman fans will know we are in the hands of an exquisite storyteller.
“He brought a new kind of intensity,” says the writer and former children’s laureate Michael Rosen. “This doesn’t mean that it’s solemn or overladen with too much commentary, but it’s a particular kind of emotional and intellectual investment in what others have treated – the medium of children’s literature and fantasy – as perhaps trivial or not capable of carrying big thoughts.”
The aim of Pullman’s books, he says, “is so ambitious. Plenty of us have tried to be ambitious but he was more ambitious and he achieved it. You can say ‘I’m going to write about the meaning of life, the universe’ and it’s nothing. What he did was say he was going to write about the meaning of life, and he did and it was amazing because, as he always said, the story comes first”. It is, he says, an “incredible thing to write a philosophical novel in which the story comes first. One in a generation manage that”.
Pullman was born in Norwich. Some of the earliest stories he heard came from the Bible, listening to his clergyman grandfather, “a wonderful storyteller … full of anecdotes and stories from the Bible and stories about saints and good people he had known. So I remember my childhood being full of stories, both in and out of church.”
His father, an RAF pilot, died in a plane crash when Pullman was seven. Some have suggested this loss is one reason why Pullman’s books are full of orphaned children, and those eventually reunited with their true parents (his explanation is more practical: “The biggest problem in writing a story about children is how to get rid of the parents … If you want a child to have adventures, get rid of the people who are going to make it their first business to stop him or her falling into danger.”)
His mother remarried another pilot, and they spent a couple of years in Australia, where Pullman devoured American comic books. Back in the UK, the family settled in North Wales, where, he has recalled, everyone around him, including the greengrocer, wrote poetry. Pullman later went to Exeter College, Oxford, to read English – he didn’t enjoy it, he later said, and would rather have gone to art school. He did, though, get to meet JRR Tolkien after he and some friends were invited to a dinner.
He started writing at university, before moving to London where he met his wife Judith, a teacher; Pullman also qualified as a teacher and they moved back to Oxford. Stories – especially Greek myths – were a huge part of his teaching methods, and he wrote and directed the school play every year.
The publisher David Fickling remembers being a young editor, sitting down to read a manuscript one morning in 1982 and not looking up until lunchtime. The book, called Ruby in the Smoke, was about Sally Lockhart, a girl seeking to unravel her father’s death in foggy Victorian London. It would be Pullman’s second published children’s novel (he had published adult novels some years before). “I was just taken,” says Fickling, who has published many of Pullman’s books since then. It was, he says, “as good as anything I’d ever read. The only thing I’m happy about is I recognised the effect it had on me.” Ruby in the Smoke did well and three more books in the series followed, as well as other books.
It was a decade later – this time over a lunch of sausages and mash – that Pullman told Fickling he had been working on a trilogy. “He said [it would be] set in the world of Blake and Milton, and he can quote for England, so he quoted Milton at me. It was wonderful. And then a few months later he delivered Northern Lights and it just blew me away. I couldn’t believe I was reading something so good again, like a step change of astounding storytelling.”
The trilogy was a huge hit, selling millions and casting Pullman as a hero of the growing atheist movement. The Catholic Herald called the trilogy “worthy of the bonfire” and when the film adaptation of the first volume came out in 2007, the US organisation the Catholic League campaigned against it. Not everyone in the church agreed. In 2009, Rowan Williams, then archbishop of Canterbury, said he admired Pullman’s work: “He takes the Christian myth, or a version of it, seriously enough to want to disagree passionately with it. It’s not just dull or remote, it’s dangerous. You’ve got to tussle with it. It’s still alive.” It was a conversation with Williams that prompted Pullman to write his next novel, re-imagining Jesus’s life – and that of his twin – in The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.
But his work isn’t all about vanquishing organised religion. Michael Rosen first met Pullman when he invited him on his radio programme about children’s books to discuss his Sally Lockhart series. “He is a multidimensional writer,” says Rosen. “It’s very easy to limit people to the book that is their most successful, but he wrote a jokey picaresque story with the scarecrow book [The Scarecrow and the Servant], he’s good at writing fairy stories – his [retelling] of the Brothers Grimm was really masterful storytelling. He is not monochrome, this is someone who is a proper author.” The triumph of His Dark Materials “shades the other stuff”.
Rosen and Pullman have worked together a lot. “He’s thoughtful, he’s serious and you know every time you have a conversation with him, it’s going to be interesting, you’re going to have a conversation about something going on now.” Pullman has been an outspoken critic of successive governments’ education policies. “He engages very seriously with any of the issues to do with children’s reading, thought, pleasure in story and non-fiction and you can always have a really interesting and good conversation about that stuff.”
Jack Thorne, the screenwriter who is adapting His Dark Materials for a new BBC series, says the same. “He is just interested and intellectually excited, that’s quite a rare quality I think. The couple of times I’ve been to his house there are piles of books everywhere and he’s excited by them. We do live in quite a cynical time and I’m sure he’s cynical about many things, but he’s not cynical about ideas.”
Success hasn’t changed Pullman says Fickling. “He is one of the few people whose feet have never left the ground. I just think he’s very straightforward and a truth-telling, approachable man. He loves practical things, and he’s a great carpenter. He writes and probably works with wood with the same attention to detail. He’s the most wonderful composer of sentences. I don’t think people notice, at the sentence level, how well made the text is.”
For fans of the trilogy – and there are millions – the long wait has been painful. Pullman has suffered too – he started growing his hair in what seemed like a kind of penance. “I made the mistake a few years ago of making a vow not to cut my hair until I’d finished the Book of Dust,” Pullman said last year. “And it was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.” Now the book is finished the ponytail has, presumably, gone. Fickling laughs. “It has, it has. He was getting a bit fed up with it.” Pullman once joked that when it was finally shorn from his head it should be saved for the nation, and perhaps the Bodleian Library might want it. That’s the other thing about Pullman says Fickling, “he has got a very good sense of humour.”.
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Born: Norwich, 1946
Career: became a teacher at 25, teaching at several schools in Oxford, then as a part-time lecturer. His first children’s book Count Karlstein was published in 1982, then Ruby in the Smoke in 1986, the first of his series featuring the detective Sally Lockhart. The His Dark Materials trilogy was published between 1995 and 2000. His other work includes short stories and a graphic novel.
High point: The books in the trilogy have won many awards, including the Carnegie of Carnegies for Northern Lights, the first volume, chosen by readers from all previous 70 winners
Low point: the film adaptation of Northern Lights, renamed The Golden Compass in the US, was not altogether well-received, including by Pullman himself
He says: “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
They say: “Pullman’s daring heresy is to rewrite the Fall as if it were an emancipation, and as if Eve had done us all a huge favour by snatching at the forbidden fruit.” Christopher Hitchens
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