Darkness Visible
Page 1
DARKNESS
VISIBLE
PHILIP PULLMAN
AND HIS DARK MATERIALS
NICHOLAS TUCKER
To Thomas, Billy, Joseph, Mimi, Lydia,
Archie, Harry and Francis, with love.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicholas Tucker was first a teacher and then an educational psychologist before becoming Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Community Studies at the University of Sussex. A frequent reviewer and broadcaster, he has written many books on children and what they read.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Philip Pullman for his generous help, which made writing and then revising this book so much easier as well as more satisfying. Also a big thank you to Kim Reynolds as always, for her unfailing and ceaselessly stimulating interest and support. Kate Agnew was a marvellous editor, coming up with a whole series of excellent suggestions. Students I have taught at Sussex University and at the Roehampton Institute have also helped me greatly over the years, as have my own children and now grandchildren in all matters to do with children’s literature.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Illustrations
Philip Pullman
His Dark Materials
The Stories
Northern Lights
The Subtle Knife
The Amber Spyglass
Will and Lyra
Science and Religion
Knowing your enemy: Lyra and Will versus the Church
Parallel worlds
What is Dust?
Dæmons
Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter
Influences and Comparisons
John Milton
William Blake
Heinrich von Kleist
Pullman, C.S. Lewis and growing up
Pullman’s Philosophy
Developments Since Publication of His Dark Materials
Conclusion
Bibliography
Books by Philip Pullman
Plays by Philip Pullman
Secondary Sources
Appendix
On the Marionette Theatre
Lyra’s Oxford
Once Upon a Time in the North
Interview with Philip Pullman
Copyright
ILLUSTRATIONS
Article from the Eastern Evening News, 3 November 1954
Philip on right, aged about seven
A school photo of Philip at eight years
Philip in top hat in Doctor in the House, aged sixteen
Exeter College, Oxford
Philip, aged 25
Philip, aged 26
Patrice Aggs’s final spread from the illustrated version of Count Karlstein
Four illustrations from Victorian penny dreadfuls
Philip with his son Jamie, in about 1980
Patrice Aggs’s Advertisement from the back of the illustrated version of Count Karlstein
Philip Pullman, taken c.1997
An engraving by Gustave Doré illustrating Milton’s Paradise Lost (Book IX, 434–5)
A watercolour painting from William Blake’s Book of Urizen
An engraving by Gustave Doré illustrating Milton’s Paradise Lost (Book II, 1–5)
The botanic gardens, Oxford
Philip Pullman
Philip Pullman was born in Norwich in 1946, the son of an RAF fighter pilot. Moving around from station to station with his younger brother Francis, they settled for a time in what was then Southern Rhodesia. Returning to Britain in 1954, they heard that their father had died in a plane crash during a raid made against the rebel Mau Mau movement in Kenya. Neither son knew their father at all well, since he was so often away from home. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross after his death, and there are newspaper pictures of Philip, then aged seven, standing with Francis outside Buckingham Palace just after his mother had received the medal on behalf of her late husband.
Years later, while going through some family papers, Pullman discovered that his mother and father were planning to divorce at the time of his father’s death. This was a considerable shock, given that any hint of this family secret had previously been kept from him. As he wrote later, his father had for him always been ‘a hero, steeped in glamour, killed in action defending his country.’ But this image too became harder to sustain given the report of the details of the death which appeared in the London Gazette in 1954 and is worth quoting here in full:
F/L.A.O Pullman was posted to Kenya on March 31st, 1953, in No.1340 Flight of Harvards, for operations against Mau Mau. The main task of the Harvards has been bombing and machine-gunning Mau Mau and their hideouts in the densely wooded and difficult country of the Aberdare Range and Mount Kenya. Pullman frequently carried out attacks which necessitated diving steeply into the gorges of Mathioya, Chania, Gura and Zuti rivers, and often in conditions of low cloud and driving rain. The citation says that he consistently displayed a fine offensive spirit and great determination in pressing home his attacks. He carried out a total of 3,400 hours flying, during which he completed 220 bombing and strafing sorties.
In 2008 the journalist Cole Moreton, in an interview with Pullman for the Independent newspaper, put it to him that despite these testing conditions there could hardly have been much opposition from the enemy at the time, given that the Mau Mau would have been unable to return any sort of effective fire. Reacting to what was to him new information, Pullman replied that: ‘My father probably doesn’t come out of this with very much credit, judged by the standards of modern liberal progressive thought.’ Subsequent revelations about sustained British civil and military brutality in Kenya during this time and after have further cemented this opinion.
1. Article from the Eastern Evening News, 3 November 1954. (Reprinted courtesy of the Eastern Evening News, Norwich.)
The brave astronaut Lee Scoresby, who plays such a heroic part in His Dark Materials, was later chosen by Pullman, when talking to child readers, as his favourite character. Could he have been partly inspired by the young Pullman’s idealisation of his father, a character created long before he was forced to admit to Cole Moreton that this new information he was now hearing amounted to ‘a serious challenge to my childhood memory’?
It is not surprising therefore that Pullman often creates young characters in his fiction who have problems with their parents, sometimes stretching far back into the past. Dead or missing fathers are also a constant occurrence in his stories, and Pullman himself remembers that he was ‘preoccupied for a long time by the mystery of what [his father] must have been like’. That mystery continues to the present day, in the sense that Pullman still feels certain that there was something not quite right about the reasons given for his father’s fatal accident, put down to machine dysfunction. But his efforts to find out more have so far proved unsuccessful.
Returning to Britain, the two boys stayed in a Norfolk rectory with their mother’s Welsh parents while she worked full time in London. Pullman’s grandfather was an Anglican clergyman, who used to tell the boys a range of stories from sources that included the Bible, as well as tales he had heard in his role as occasional prison chaplain at Norwich Gaol.
2. Philip on right, aged about seven. (Reproduced by kind permission of Philip Pullman.)
One of his jobs was to accompany prisoners to the gallows after they had been condemned to death. With money always tight, he took up this additional duty as a matter of course. The boys were never aware of any extra strain involved, since their grandfather did not wish to upset them by letting them know the reason for these occasional absences. It was only years later, when Pullman was an adult, that his grandfathe
r told him of the pain that this part of his job had caused him.
Far from turning him against religion, Pullman now remembers his grandfather as ‘a wonderful man: gentle and humane as well as a marvellous storyteller’. He has also described him as ‘the most important influence in my life’. Very much a traditional head of the household, and a gratifyingly important figure in the village, the boys’ grandfather could be playful too. Above all, he was a man ‘in whose presence you wanted to be good’. Pullman still loves the traditional language and atmospheric settings of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, so associated in his own mind with his grandfather. Regular visits to church and Sunday school occurred during this time. Years later, Pullman makes use of Biblical stories and imagery throughout His Dark Materials, even though his feelings have now turned against the Christian religion that he no longer believes in.
There was never enough room in his mother’s small London flat for her children, nor could she afford to give up full-time work. But a child’s fantasies are not concerned with objective reality. So it’s also possible that some of the hostility felt for that ambiguous mother Mrs Coulter in His Dark Materials dates back to the small boy’s anger and bewilderment at having been, in his eyes, temporarily abandoned by his own mother. Mrs Coulter, after all, combines both strongly positive and utterly negative images of womanhood. Could this contradictory mixture also reflect some of the conflicting feelings Philip may occasionally have felt towards his mother at the time? Now no longer alive, does she continue to live on in a number of her son’s best works?
Pullman has, however, stated that Mrs Coulter is easily his favourite character after her daughter Lyra. Beautiful, wicked, unpredictable and amoral, her presence is always exciting. Absent mothers often attract all sorts of fantasies in the imagination of the children they leave behind, not all of them by any means negative. Mrs Coulter’s undeniable charm and feminine allure, for example, are at one with the fantasies the young Philip had about his mother’s supposedly fast-paced and glamorous city life away from her country-based family. Visiting her in London he remembers admiring her general sense of style, so different from the simplicities of rural Norfolk. There were also exciting theatre visits, and encounters with her various hard-drinking friends.
In conversation now he insists that at the time he took her absence for granted. He believes there was never any suffering on his part simply because his grandparents were providing all the love he and his brother needed. Living in a large rectory, the boys had plenty of room to play, constantly diving into their grandfather’s extensive dressing-up collection, so often put to use in the various village pageants and processions he liked to organise. There was also a large garden and the run of the village at a time when traffic was minimal. But the prolonged absences of a mother, however good the reason, must still at times have been painful for a growing child.
His equally loving grandmother is remembered by Philip as constantly warm and gracious, as well as sharply intelligent. Her sister lived in the household too, a maiden lady who had been disappointed in love and had since become, in Pullman’s own words, ‘a bit of a drudge’. Somewhat frail and also totally devoted to the boys in a way that Pullman has described as simple-hearted in the purest sense, she made up the trio of older adults who provided the two children with an atmosphere of unconditional love.
Aged eight, Pullman attended a prep school near Norwich. It was there that a kindly teacher read him and fourteen other boys the whole of Coleridge’s famous poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Listening spellbound, Pullman felt gripped as never before, and began to wonder about one day becoming a writer himself. By now a stepfather had come along, also an RAF pilot, and the new family travelled halfway round the world in an ocean liner to a posting in Australia. In time Pullman was also to make long boat journeys to the Suez Canal, Bombay, Aden, Colombo, Las Palmas and Madeira as part of the restless life of any child whose father or stepfather was in one of the armed services.
3. A school photo of Philip at eight years. (Reproduced by kind permission of Philip Pullman.)
It was on this particular voyage to Australia that the two boys, when both came down with scarlet fever, started inventing games as fierce as they were intense. Using a plastic construction kit to build forts and castles, they played out various imaginary conflicts for days at a time, each boy taking the part of either the good or bad guy as the situation demanded. Once they were settled into their new home, such games then became influenced by the Superman- and Batman-style comics, which the nine-year-old Philip totally adored.
There was also Australian radio, with its serials about Superman, cowboys and a kangaroo that kept tools in its pouch. With these this remarkable animal could repair almost anything, including broken-down trains, so on occasions saving valuable lives. Pullman now believes that it was the adventures of this kangaroo that kick-started his career as a storyteller. Each night, when the boys had gone to bed in their shared room and the light was turned off, Philip would sing out his version of the heroic kangaroo’s radio signature tune. There would then follow a story made up on the spot, with neither Philip nor his brother Francis having any idea how it would end.
Pullman can still recall the feeling of excitement as each story seemed to find its own particular path, just as his stories do today, often to the surprise of the author himself. That section of the National Curriculum that requires all pupils in schools today to make a plan before writing their own story is particularly detested by Pullman. For him, this is the equivalent to killing off the imagination before it has even had a chance to get started.
The following year Philip, now aged ten, was back in Britain, first at a prep school in Battersea and then at Ysgol Ardudwy, a state school in Harlech: the last of the eight different schools he was to attend. This coincided with a move by the family to Wales, with Pullman’s stepfather resigning as an RAF pilot to concentrate instead on civilian flying. He was now also acting as a father to four children, two siblings having been born after he and Pullman’s mother had married. The part of North Wales they chose to live in was to provide Pullman with what he now remembers as ‘a wonderful time’:
We lived up in the woods, about a mile above [a] very small village, right at the edge of a hill. We just wandered all over the place, there were no boundaries … It was a time when children were allowed to and indeed expected, really, to leave the house after breakfast and not come back till darkness fell. And many times we did that. So I had a sort of wild and very unsupervised time, which was just great.
At school, while his brother was making model aeroplanes and volunteering for the Air Training Corps, Pullman preferred to spend his spare time reading, writing poetry, painting or strumming on his guitar. But from the age of thirteen he also came under the influence of Enid Jones, an inspired English teacher, to whom he still sends copies of his latest books. Her support and enthusiasm were important factors in helping him win a scholarship in 1965, after taking the entrance exams for Exeter College, Oxford, in order to study English. He was the first pupil from his school ever to go to Oxford University; winning a much-sought-after scholarship was an even more impressive achievement.
Although he had hoped that his time at university would further help him become an author, Pullman never found the inspiration there that he was looking for. Having fallen in love with the place on first visiting it while still at school, he felt badly let down by what he experienced as poor-quality teaching. He found lectures boring and there was an absence of any seminars where he could learn from, and debate with, other students. This meant that his only teaching contact each week was one hour with a tutor who never seemed interested in the first place. Pullman also grew increasingly restless with a system that demanded so much reading from one week to another while also providing so little time for adequate discussion.
After a year he applied to join a quite different course specialising in politics, philosophy and psychology. But his request was refused, a
nd his final, disappointing, third-class degree was an indication of what can go wrong when a clever pupil is denied the sort of learning experience within which he or she can truly flourish. Pullman’s often passionate engagement with educational issues since could well date back to this time. Excellent teaching at school then replaced by a university system where little tuition of real value ever seemed to happen was enough to make anyone angry.
There were plenty of good times though, with some acting in drama groups and folk-singing to his own guitar accompaniment. There was also ‘a group of idle friends who occupied their time and mine betting on horses, getting drunk, and sprawling about telling creepy tales’. This life had something in common with Lyra’s own time at Oxford, including her habit of crawling about on her college’s roof:
In my second year I occupied the rooms at the top of staircase 8, next to the lodge tower, and a friend, Jim Taylor, discovered that you could get out of the window and crawl along a very useful gutter behind the parapet. From there you could climb in through another window further along. I gave Lyra a better head for heights than I have, but I did the gutter crawl a number of times, usually when there was a party on the next staircase.
During his last year at university, Pullman came across the plot description on the back of Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous pre-war Russian novel The Master and Margarita. This read: ‘One hot spring the devil arrives in Moscow accompanied by a retinue that includes a beautiful naked witch and an immense talking black cat with a fondness for chess and vodka.’ Without wanting to read the actual book, in case it interfered with the workings of his own imagination, Pullman knew straightaway that this mixture of the ordinary and the fantastic was what he was looking for in his own writing, and decided there and then to become a novelist. Starting to write his first book on a beautiful summer morning the day after he left university, Pullman got to page 70 of a magical-realistic story before he was summoned to Uganda to look after his sick mother. He told himself that if he could still get to page 100, he would know that one day he would really become a proper author. Writing his three pages a day, a habit he has maintained ever since, he finally made his hundred pages before abandoning the story which he had now lost interest in, without even bothering to type it out.