Daemon Voices

by Philip Pullman

  I think that’s true, but Doyle and Paget were not the first pair of creators to seize the public mind in that way. Sixty years before Sherlock Holmes, Oliver Twist was being brought to a double life by Dickens and his illustrator, and when we think of Bill Sikes, or Fagin, or Mr. Bumble, or the Artful Dodger, it is Cruikshank’s figures that emerge in the mind’s eye, and Cruikshank who lies behind every adaptation of the story for stage or screen since then.

  The success of the novel was immediate. It proved that the sensation the young author had made with Pickwick was not a flash in the pan, but that here was a writer whose range was wide, whose energy was formidable, whose inventiveness unlimited.

  How lucky to be a reader at that time, when Pickwick was drawing to an end, and Oliver Twist was coming out month by month, and Nicholas Nickleby was just beginning! From then on, Dickens was as secure in the affections of the public as any writer has ever been, before or since.

  And it is hardly too much to say that Oliver Twist, thirty years later, killed him. In the last few years of his life, Dickens turned more and more to performance: to the public reading of his works as a source not only of money (an abundance of it), but also of a sort of psychological reassurance. The applause, the laughter and the tears, the praise with which he was showered, and even the faintings and the cries of horror—all drew him back time and again to the platform and the limelight.

  And in 1868, he devised a reading from Oliver Twist: Sikes’s murder of Nancy. His son and some of his friends, seeing the alarming effect it had on Dickens’s state of mind as well as his body, urged him not to do it, but he insisted on going ahead. Perhaps he was exorcising his childhood fear of Captain Murderer, or perhaps he was engaging with some subterranean passion whose origins no one can guess at now; but he acted out the scene with such an extremity of frenzy that, as well as terrifying his audiences, it seriously undermined his strength. Eighteen months later, he was dead.

  But the book lives, and is as vigorous and healthy now as it ever was. In fact, it’s more so; because like a very small handful of other figures from the history of the novel—Don Quixote tilting at the windmills, Heathcliff and Cathy on the moors, Captain Ahab in his mad quest for the white whale, Dr. Jekyll drinking the potion that will turn him into Mr. Hyde—little Oliver Twist asking the beadle for more gruel has passed beyond the limits of literature altogether, and entered the realm of myth.

  THIS ESSAY WAS FIRST PUBLISHED AS THE INTRODUCTION TO THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITION OF OLIVER TWIST (RANDOM HOUSE, 2001).

  I don’t think any edition of Dickens ought to leave out the illustrations. The same goes for many nineteenth-century books, Vanity Fair in particular, where the pictures are Thackeray’s own work, and frequently undermine or comment subtly on what the words are saying. And any criticism that ignores the pictures is failing to do its work.

  Let’s Pretend

  NOVELS, FILMS AND THE THEATRE

  On stories in different forms: the literal, the metaphorical and the magical

  I once heard Christopher Hampton make a very interesting point about the novel, and the theatre, and cinema. He said that the novel and the film have much more in common than either of them does with the stage play, and the main reason for that is the close-up. The narrator of a novel, and the director of a film, can look where they like, and as close as they like, and we have to look with them; but each member of the audience in a theatre is at a fixed distance from the action. There are no close-ups on the stage.

  And that makes a real difference in telling a story. It makes a difference to adaptations too. There’s a sense in which novels adapt more naturally to the screen than to the stage, especially novels written in the past hundred years, ever since the cinema and its fluent, swift-moving, swift-cutting narrative began to enrich our common understanding of how stories can work.

  But should we adapt stories from one medium to another in the first place? Isn’t there something a little second-hand about the process?

  It’s possible to become rather stern about this. Some critics, including the estimable Michael Billington, theatre critic for the Guardian newspaper, somewhat disapprove of adaptations, and would prefer the theatre to produce new plays rather than rework old books. The trouble with that position is that the theatre itself is much less high-minded than those who keep a watchful eye on its purity; the stage has always cheerfully swiped whatever good stories were going. Dickens, for example, was a favourite source. As is well-known, two separate adaptations of Oliver Twist were playing on stage before the monthly serialisation of the novel came to an end.

  Today we take it for granted that if a novel is successful, it must be followed in due course by the film. And various expectations and assumptions about fiction and cinema have now become commonplace—that the best films are often made of the least good books, for example, or that short stories make better films than novels, or that the Merchant-Ivory “heritage” model is the only appropriate way of filming most English classics. In particular, there’s the feeling that an adaptation of a well-loved novel will always be disappointing, because she doesn’t look like that, and he’d never say that, and they’ve left out our favourite character, and they’ve set the story in San Francisco instead of Wolverhampton, and they’ve changed the ending. So we all know about films and books.

  But because of the dominance of the cinema, it’s become rather less common for novels to make it to the stage. Consequently, they are more conspicuous when they do, and the process is more closely questioned, especially when it happens in the subsidised theatre.

  Part of this is no doubt sound social bookkeeping: is public money being sensibly spent? Shouldn’t the taxpayer be supporting new work rather than recycling old? This is reinforced by the fact that novels are usually adapted for the stage when they are already popular and successful. No one is rushing to adapt stories that the public has clearly decided it doesn’t like. The argument against presenting best-sellers on the subsidised stage is that the commercial theatre is the place for that sort of production; the last thing such books need is yet another chance to make their authors rich. The argument for it is that public money ought to be spent on stories the public actually likes, rather than arty stuff that’s only of interest to a self-appointed elite. This is such a familiar debate that you could wind it up and it would go on by itself, indefinitely.

  But the case of children’s books is slightly different. A sort of worthiness argument sometimes comes into play here: it’s good that children should know classic stories like Treasure Island and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Secret Garden, and so it’s okay to adapt them for the stage, because if the children get a taste for the story they might read the books later on—or at least be able to display the sort of superficial familiarity that will help with homework and exams. It’s educational. So the play in this case is not a destination, but a road sign: the real importance and value of the experience is not here but over there.

  The worthiness argument also values theatre over film. It costs less to go to the cinema, and we do it more often. Visits to the theatre are expensive and infrequent; so, unconsciously, we feel theatre must be more valuable. Manners come into it too. People tend to behave more decorously in the theatre than in the cinema; they don’t usually spread popcorn all over the place, or talk loudly, or sprawl with their legs over the back of the seats in front. If we accustom our children to the theatre, their manners will improve, perhaps.

  Well, I’m all for improving children’s manners, and I do think that they ought to be thoroughly educated. But the trouble with getting the theatre to bring these things about is that it isn’t actually the theatre’s job. I think the theatre should do what it does best, the thing that only it can do. To get to what that is, we have to touch on another point of difference between the stage and the screen, which is this: the screen is literal, the stage metaphorical. It may sound paradoxical in an a
ge of computer-generated wizardry and special effects, but the cinema is essentially a realistic medium. When it comes to representing something with literal accuracy, the cinema will always trump the stage.

  To take an example from His Dark Materials; if I describe in the novel a dæmon changing shape from a cat to a snake, or a gigantic bear wearing armour, or ten thousand witches flying through the Arctic skies, the cinema can show us that, exactly that, complete in every detail. The theatre can’t.

  But where the theatre scores over the cinema is in the power of metaphor and its engagement with the audience’s own imagination. A puppet with a light inside it represents a dæmon that’s alive; with imagination, we understand that the light fading and going out represents the dæmon’s death. A puppet moves not by itself but because an operator moves it; dress the operator in black and hide their face behind a black mask, and with imagination we accept that the operator is not invisible but “invisible.” A boat emerges from the darkness on a platform that slowly sinks towards the stage, turning as it does so we can see the boatman’s face; with imagination, we accept that it’s moving across a dark body of water towards us.

  We have to pretend, and furthermore all of us have to pretend together. With video and DVD the experience of film is often, these days, not so much a joint experience in a big public space as a private experience in a small one. But there is no way of packaging the theatre up and taking it home; we have to go there, and share it with others. And once there, we have to agree to sit in the dark and be quiet at the same time and all imagine together.

  In short, the thing that the theatre does best and most potently is to tell stories in a way that partakes of magic, of ritual, of enchantment. It doesn’t always happen: sometimes a play just doesn’t work; sometimes it might work in a smaller space, or a different space, but not the one it happens to be occupying; sometimes a cast is tired or discouraged, and performances are perfunctory; sometimes the audience doesn’t play its part, and sits there radiating sullen hostility and giving nothing back to the performers.

  But when everything is working well, something mysterious happens between an audience and a play that isn’t just the sum of the component parts. It can spring from the obviously fantastical and from the most minutely described realism: Rostand makes it happen, and so does Shaw. It happens with original plays, and it happens with adaptations. But something happens, and everything is transformed. We could use a scientific term like emergence for this process, or we could use an older word and call it sorcery; but whatever we call it, there’s no point in trying to explain it to those who insist on a functional justification for everything, those who can only see value in an activity if it brings in money from tourists, or helps children with their exams. They’ll never understand. You have to find some other sort of language if you want to convince them.

  But that strange and inexplicable thing is what the theatre is for. That’s why we need it.

  THIS ESSAY FIRST APPEARED AS AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN, 24 NOVEMBER 2004, WITH THE STAGE ADAPTATION OF HIS DARK MATERIALS IN REP AT THE NATIONAL THEATRE, LONDON, AND THE FIREWORK-MAKER’S DAUGHTER ABOUT TO OPEN AT THE LYRIC HAMMERSMITH, LONDON.

  Schools must take children to the theatre. This activity must be subsidised. Children should be able to join a youth theatre near where they live, and learn how to take part in every aspect of putting on a play. Places like that should be subsidised too. These things are not luxuries: they’re essential to our wellbeing.

  The Firework-Maker’s Daughter on Stage

  THE STORY OF A STORY

  How she became a play, then a book, and then another play

  A very long time ago, when I was a teacher, I used to write a play every year to put on at my school. It was supposed to be for the benefit of the pupils, but really it was for me. As the summer came to an end I would start to write the script, and what I wrote would depend on what kind of atmosphere I wanted to revel in at the end of the autumn term. One year it was Gothic, with a demon huntsman and a gloomy castle and caves in the snow-bound forest; another year it was a Victorian penny dreadful, with fog-bound streets and opium dens and desperate villainy; another year it was the atmosphere of the Thousand and One Nights and a bird with a magic feather.

  Each year I would add some new theatrical trick to my repertoire: a shadow-puppet interlude, or a scene painted on a gauze that would magically vanish when you raised the lights behind and lowered them in front, or a wind machine and a thunderstorm. I had more fun fooling about with those things than I’ve ever had before or since.

  And one year I wanted to involve fireworks. Well, you can’t really, of course, not in a school play, not indoors; there are things called fire regulations. Nevertheless, I wanted to. I wanted lots of bright lights and blazing rockets and loud bangs, and I wanted…I wanted…gamelan music! Gongs and xylophones and lots of dancing—and masks—and an elephant! I was desperate to have an elephant.

  So I did. My play wasn’t called The Firework-Maker’s Daughter to begin with. In a library somewhere, a long time before, I had seen some stage designs for a play called The Elephant of Siam, or The Fire-Fiend. It was by a dramatist called William Moncrieff, who lived in the early part of the nineteenth century. His greatest success was called The Cataract of the Ganges, which featured a real waterfall on stage (they knew how to put plays on in those days). I don’t think The Elephant of Siam was ever published, because I’ve never managed to find the script; but I loved what I remembered of the stage designs—all flames and wild rocks and exotic dancers, and I suppose those pictures must have been at the back of my mind when I wanted a play full of fireworks and so on. So I wrote my play to fit that title—The Elephant of Siam, or The Fire-Fiend.

  What I had to do, to start with, was find a plot that connected the elephant and the fire-fiend. And in turn that meant that I had to think what a fire-fiend might be, and what part he could play in the story; so I thought about that for a while, and then put it aside to think about the elephant. I’d heard of the famous white elephants of Siam, and the way the king would give such an elephant to someone he wanted to ruin, because those rare and important beasts would cost so much to feed and care for that the unfortunate victim would go bankrupt trying to look after them. A white elephant…what could I do on stage with a white elephant?

  The idea came at once: graffiti. All that white space would be so tempting; and if there was a naughty boy in charge of the elephant, he could get other naughty boys to pay him to let them write BANGKOK WANDERERS FOR THE CUP or CHANG LOVES LOTUS BLOSSOM TRUE XXX on the elephant’s flanks. And if the elephant was an artistic, sensitive soul, who was horribly embarrassed—so much the better!

  Well, that was the elephant seen to. And as for the fire-fiend—who was now important enough to have capital letters: he was the Fire-Fiend—that was the point where I could have my dancing, and masks, and maybe some flame effects. (The man I hired the stage lights from every year was always keen to tell me about the latest effects he had in stock, and I was always keen to use them. I spent a lot of the play’s budget with him. We got on very well). The Fire-Fiend would have to be the god of fire. And someone would have to go to his grotto and walk through the flames. Why did he have a grotto? Because I like the word grotto, and I like to use it as often as possible. Of course he had to have a grotto—in a volcano, naturally. And somehow that all suggested fireworks…someone needed something to make fireworks with…what? What special thing, that you could only get from the Fire-Fiend himself?

  That was how the story began to put itself together. But my first Lila wasn’t the daughter of a firework-maker; she was a princess. She was the daughter of the king, who had apprenticed herself to Lalchand the firework-maker, and this was a most deadly secret, because of course princesses weren’t allowed to do interesting things like make fireworks, and if it was discovered, then both she and Lalchand would face death. (There was an executioner with an
enormous axe, who was always complaining: “I’m not doing all them,” he protested when he was told to see to Rambashi’s gang at one point in the story.)

  There was also a sub-plot involving an invasion masterminded by the Queen of China, as far as I remember, but it was only there to provide an excuse for a gigantic custard-pie fight at the end.

  The music was very important. I wanted that full gamelan orchestra. Never mind the fact that gamelan music isn’t Thai, or Siamese; white elephants can’t speak, either. I wanted the sound of all those gongs and drums, and I was going to have it. A friend of mine called Tony Dixon, a brilliant engineer, made a mock-gamelan out of hubcaps and lengths of mild steel and copper tubing, and his wife, Rachel, the music teacher at the school, wrote a score for it. It looked so good that we put it on the stage, and the musicians were costumed, and acted like a sort of Greek chorus, looking shocked or approving and cheering or booing as the story unfolded.

  And masks…I didn’t let anyone else make the masks. I wanted to have all the fun myself. I made the Goddess of the Emerald Lake out of papier-mâché, and the Fire-Fiend (who had now got a name: Razvani) out of book-cloth, or buckram stiffened with size, which I cut into small strips and soaked in Polycell and formed over a plasticine mould. You can build it up until it’s as thick and tough as leather. And then you can paint it. The Razvani mask is still with me, sitting on the bookshelves just behind me in my study.

  Well, that play came and went, as plays do. But I always thought the story deserved another lease of life, so in due course I made it into a book, and changed it somewhat. Lila became the firework-maker’s daughter; the Queen of China disappeared entirely; and I introduced the fireworks contest instead of the custard-pie fight. It was better like this, because something real and important—in fact, desperate—hangs on the outcome.