That’s what I thought, and that’s what I think.
However, there I was, led by my imagination towards something quite different. So I couldn’t help thinking about what I was doing, and wondering why I felt that way about fantasy, and what the difference was between fantasy and realism in the first place.
After all, the characters in Middlemarch never really existed, any more than Frodo Baggins did. There never was a Dorothea or a Casaubon; Dr. Lydgate and Mr. Brooke had no corporeal existence; Mary Garth and Fred Vincy are no more than phantoms. Like God, they are non-real.
But they seem real, because they have the sort of psychological complexity and depth and unpredictability that our friends do. So maybe that was the problem with fantasy: not that it was about elves, but that it was psychologically shallow. Because when I thought about—when I think about—the fantasy that I’ve read, the sort of stuff written by Tolkien and his thousand imitators, I have to say that it’s pretty thin. There’s not much nourishment there: “There’s no goodness in it,” as my granny used to say about tinned soup. Inventiveness a-plenty—no shortage of strange creatures and made-up languages and broad landscapes—“prodigious noble wild prospects,” in Dr. Johnson’s words—and the film of The Lord of the Rings was inventive in just the same way; but that kind of thing is not hard to make up, actually. Entities of that sort multiply themselves without much effort from the writer, because a lot of the details are purely arbitrary.
But there isn’t a character in the whole of The Lord of the Rings who has a tenth of the complexity, the interest, the sheer fascination, of even a fairly minor character from Middlemarch, such as Mary Garth. Nothing in her is arbitrary; everything is necessary and organic, by which I mean that she really does seem to have grown into life, and not to have been assembled from a kit of parts. She’s surprising.
It’s not just character-drawing, either; it’s moral truthfulness. I can’t remember anything in The Lord of the Rings, in all that vast epic of heroic battles and ancient magic, that titanic struggle between good and evil, that even begins to approach the ethical power and the sheer moral shock of the scene in Jane Austen’s Emma when Mr. Knightley reproaches the heroine for her thoughtless treatment of poor Miss Bates. Emma’s mortification is one of those eye-opening moments after which nothing is the same. Emma will grow up now, and if we pay attention to what’s happening in the scene, so will we. That’s what realistic fiction can do, and what fantasy of the Tolkien sort doesn’t.
Well, that was what I was embarrassed about: that I might be writing stuff that would turn out to be mere invention, superficial, arbitrary, trivial, with nothing to distinguish it externally from a thousand other big fat books crowding the fantasy shelves, all with titles like The Doomsword Chronicles, Volume 17 or Runequest or Orcslayer. But I was anxious that there’d be nothing to distinguish my work from that sort of thing internally, either. I feared that I’d find myself assembling my characters in an arbitrary way from a kit of parts, and finding nothing important to say about them.
What it boiled down to was that I was doing something I didn’t quite believe in, because that’s one of the things that embarrassment signifies: a lack of conviction—the self-consciousness that arises from being caught doing something unconvincing—you hesitate; the belief goes, to paraphrase Eliot, between the thought and the action falls a shadow.
Now I knew that His Dark Materials was going to be a long story. I guessed it would take over a thousand pages to tell it in full: not months of work, but years. And the thought of spending all those years—it was to take me seven years, in the end—doing something in which I didn’t believe was horrible. We have to believe in our work; the only thing that lightens the burden of it, sometimes, is the sense that it matters, and that we’ve committed ourselves to something valuable, so that even if we don’t succeed we’ll have an honourable failure.
So there was my imagination, pulling me towards a world of talking bears and witches, and there was my embarrassment, or something, whispering, “You don’t believe in it. You don’t think it’s worthy of you. What’s the point of working at something you’re going to be ashamed of?”
However, if I know anything about writing stories, it’s this: that you have to do what your imagination wants, not what your fastidious literary taste is inclined towards, not what your finely honed judgement feels comfortable with, not what your desire for the esteem of critics advises you to. Good intentions never wrote a story worth reading: only the imagination can do that. So the imagination was going to win here, if I had anything to do with it; and what I had to do to help it win was to neutralise my uneasiness about fantasy; and the way to do that was to find a way of making fantasy serve the purposes of realism.
Because when I thought about it, there was no reason why fantasy shouldn’t be realistic, in a psychological sense—and it was the lack of that sort of realism that I objected to in the work of the big Tolkien and all the little Tolkiens. After all, when I looked at Paradise Lost, there was plenty of psychological realism going on there, and the fantastical elements—the angels and the devils, the landscapes of hell, Satan’s encounter with Sin and Death, and so on—were all there to embody states of mind. They weren’t unreal like Gandalf; they were non-real like Mary Garth—convincing and truthful in every way except actual existence.
I saw that it was possible to use fantasy to say something important, and clearly I’d have to do that, or try to, in order to get through the next seven years. I had to try to use all my various invented creatures—the dæmons, the armoured bears, the angels—to say something that I thought was true and important about us, about being human, about growing up and living and dying. My inventions were not real, but I hoped I could make them non-real, and not unreal.
This, finally, is what I think the value of fantasy is: that it’s a great vehicle when it serves the purposes of realism, and a lot of old cobblers when it doesn’t.
I must also say that while I’m perfectly happy to point out what I think are the good things in my own work, I’m not blind to its defects. There are things about my trilogy which I’d like to go back and change—shading down some of the starkness here, pointing up the contrasts a little more there. I can tell you what my biggest mistake was: I was wrong about the motivation of the President of the Consistorial Court of Discipline, Father MacPhail. In the book as it is now, he seems to be motivated mainly by the lust for power. I wish I’d seen, as I was writing it, that it would be much more effective if his motivation were love: that he does these terrible things out of sheer compassion. He’s killing people in order to save their souls. If I’d written it like that, it would be easier to see that the struggle in the story is not one between good and evil—because that’s easy; we all know whose side we’re on; there’s no doubt about it. We might as well be reading Tolkien. It’s much more interesting, because much more realistic, when there’s a struggle between different goods.
But there we are. No literary work much longer than a haiku is going to be entirely without faults. Even Middlemarch has its sunspots. But although we often end in disappointment, we can begin again in hope; as writers or readers, when we start a new book, we hope that this time it’ll be good all the way through.
Thank you for inviting me here, and thank you for listening.
THIS TALK WAS DELIVERED AT THE SEA OF FAITH NATIONAL CONFERENCE IN LEICESTER ON 24 JULY 2002.
This was written for the same event as “Balloon Debate” (page 301). I’m always interested to listen to religious people, some for longer than others, perhaps. People with the religious position associated with the Sea of Faith, which is (roughly speaking) that God is non-real, are more inclined to listen in return than others, perhaps.
The Story of The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
A RESPONSE TO PUZZLED READERS
On telling a familiar story from a different angle
Some writers—apparently William Golding was one—are firmly of the opinion that there is a correct way to read their books, and they argue strongly with readers who, they think, have got them wrong. My view is exactly the opposite. Readers may interpret my work in any way they please, and people do. Some readers, indeed, have seen things—connections and patterns and implications—I had no idea were there. If such phenomena reflect well on me, of course, I claim to have put them there on purpose.
The problem with my telling people what I think such-and-such a story means is that my interpretation seems to have some extra authority, which shuts down debate: if the author himself has said it means X, then it can’t mean Y. Believing as I do in the democracy of reading, I don’t like the sort of totalitarian silence that descends when there is one authoritative reading of any text.
So in general I prefer not to discuss the meaning of my work. But The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is different from the sort of books I’ve published before. It isn’t a novel, not exactly, and yet it’s fiction, or seems to be, but it’s fiction of a sort we don’t often see these days: it’s allegory, of a kind, but not straightforward allegory either. It has become apparent to me that there are readers who are failing to get it not only because they don’t like it, but because they think it’s one kind of thing, and it’s another.
Moreover, the protagonist of this story belongs not just to me but to the history and the culture of the past two thousand years, and the story about him is not just any story but the foundation story of the Christian religion. It is too important to too many people for me to take my usual line. This time I have to say something about what I’ve done with this story, and explain, so to speak, where I’m coming from.
* * *
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CHRISTIANITY FORMED MY MIND. I WASN’T AN UNUSUALLY PIOUS child, but I did firmly believe in the God I was told about, and I did believe everything I said in the Apostles’ Creed every Sunday. I didn’t question it for a moment; I assumed it to be true in the way I assumed there to be an equator and lines of latitude and longitude, which I could see on the map but never actually on the ground or on the water. I had crossed the equator four times by the age of nine, each time at sea, and each time the event was celebrated with a jolly ceremony involving sailors dressed up as King Neptune and people being ducked into the swimming pool.
So I knew that grown-ups behaved as if the equator certainly existed, although you couldn’t actually see it; and they did so in serious ways as well as comical ones, because the ships I was on were navigated according to these invisible lines. Grown-ups believed that the equator existed, and so did latitude and longitude, and by acting on this belief they brought me safely to land. Why should I doubt them when they told me that God existed (though you couldn’t see Him either), that various improbable events had taken place in the life of Jesus, and that I would go to Heaven if I believed it all and was a good boy? I believed every word of it.
A further reason for its hold on me was that Christianity was transmitted to us in those days in the language of the King James Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and Hymns Ancient and Modern. I was always susceptible to the music of language; it was the rhythms of Kipling’s Just So Stories that taught me to read, and I was never daunted by words I didn’t understand as long as I could pronounce them. Indeed, singing or intoning or simply whispering words I didn’t understand was a sensuous delight. I was perfectly comfortable with not understanding much of what I heard in church: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” meant little, but resonated greatly; the line “Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb” from the carol “O Come, All Ye Faithful” was utterly mysterious to me, but delightful to sing.
In fact, the traditions and the language of Christianity are so deeply embedded in my memory, in my nerves and my muscles, that not even a surgical operation could remove them.
I know nothing about other religions, by the way; if I tried to write about (say) Islam, I would make all kinds of blunders without even realising that they were blunders, because I’m not at home there. That is why (to answer one correspondent) I haven’t written The Good Man Muhammad and the Scoundrel Allah.
As I say, I was formed by Christianity—but memories are not enough to sustain a faith. It was in my teenage years that believing finally became impossible; after I’d learned a little science, the meaning of creation in six days and conception by means of the Holy Ghost had to be understood metaphorically rather than literally, and once that was done, the miracles vanished and only God himself was left. Although I carried on a fairly anguished one-sided conversation with Him for some time, the silence on His part was complete.
Nowadays I’m as sure as I can be that there is nothing in that God-shaped space. I’m a thoroughgoing materialist. I think that matter is quite extraordinary and wonderful and mysterious enough, without adding something called spirit to it; in fact, any talk about the spiritual makes me feel a little uneasy. When I hear such utterances as “My spiritual journey,” or “I’m spiritual but not religious,” or “So-and-so is a deeply spiritual person,” or even phrases of a thoroughly respectable Platonic kind such as “The eternal reality of a supreme goodness,” my reaction is a visceral one. I pull back almost physically. I feel not so much puzzlement as vertigo, as if I’m leaning out over a void. There is just nothing there.
Consequently, the immense and complicated structures of Christian theology seem to me like the epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy—preposterously elaborated methods of explaining away a basic mistake. When astronomers realised that the planets went round the sun, not the earth, the glorious simplicity of the truth blew away the epicycles like so many cobwebs: everything worked perfectly without them.
And as soon as you realise that God doesn’t exist, the same sort of thing happens to all those doctrines such as atonement, the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, original sin, the Trinity, justification by faith, prevenient grace, and so on. Cobwebs, dusty bits of rag, frail scraps of faded cloth: they hide nothing, they decorate nothing, and for me they mean nothing.
“But look at the good work the churches have done!” I hear. “Look at the hospitals, the orphanages, the schools! And look further, at the architecture, the art and music they have sponsored and inspired!”
Yes, and all those things are good, and we are better off for their existence. They go some way towards mitigating the evils the churches have done too: the Crusades, the witch-hunts, the heretic-burnings, the narrow fanatical zeal that comes so swiftly and naturally to some individuals in positions of power when faith gives them an excuse.
However, the people who use that argument seem to imply that until the church existed no one ever knew how to be good, or create a work of art, or do anything selflessly, and no one could do good nowadays unless they did it because of their faith. I simply don’t believe that.
But I can’t escape my Christian background. And I am a storyteller. We write out of what we are; and I thought it would be interesting to read the gospels again, and to see if I could tell the familiar story from a different angle. So I picked up the Bible again. Actually I picked up three: the Authorised Version, the New English Bible, whose publication I remembered causing great excitement when I was a child, and the New Revised Standard Version. Having no Greek, I thought I should at least triangulate between different English versions to get the meaning clear in my mind.
I began there, because by far the most important sources for the life of Jesus are the four canonical gospels. The canon of scripture was settled in the fourth century, when the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were chosen by a council of the church to form part of the New Testament. They are the basis for orthodox Christian belief.
But there are many other gospels, some of which have been known for centuries and some of which have been more recently discovered. I thought I should look at
them too. One view of these other texts is that of M. R. James, the great writer of ghost stories, who published a translation of various apocryphal gospels in 1924. He wrote:
People may still be heard to say, “After all, these Apocryphal Gospels and Acts, as you call them, are just as interesting as the old ones. It was only by accident or caprice that they were not put into the New Testament.” The best answer to such loose talk has always been, and is now, to produce the writings and let them tell their own story. It will very quickly be seen that there is no question of anyone’s having excluded them from the New Testament; they have excluded themselves.
Daemon Voices Page 33