Darkness Visible

by Nicholas Tucker

  4. Philip in top hat in Doctor in the House, aged sixteen. (Reproduced by kind permission of Philip Pullman.)

  5. Exeter College, Oxford, on which the Jordan College of His Dark Materials is based. The doorway to staircase 8 is on the right of the main archway (in the centre of the photo).

  With the vague idea of also becoming a singer-songwriter in his spare time, Pullman first worked in London at the gents’s outfitters Moss Bros before trying his hand as an assistant librarian. A second novel followed, which won Pullman joint first prize in a literary competition designed for would-be writers below the age of 25. Described by Pullman as a metaphysical thriller, he now condemns this book as rubbish and wants nothing more to do with it. Finally training as a teacher, he married Judith Speller in 1970. For the next twelve years he taught children between 9 and 13, both at the rough end of Oxford and also in a more middle-class area.

  One of his jobs was to put on the school play, and soon he was writing the material himself, ranging from comic melodrama to ghost stories. These productions were popular with parents as well as with pupils, giving Pullman his first hint that adults and children often enjoy the same sort of story so long as it is put over to them effectively. Turning the plays into published stories was a further step in his career as an author. At his second school, Pullman also had the job of stocking the school library. Initially he was doubtful whether parents would be willing to embrace some of the new realism in teenage fiction that was at this time causing some controversy. Summoning six parents from all walks of life to a meeting, Pullman handed out some of the more outspoken titles he particularly respected. He then asked them to read each title carefully, before deciding whether these were the sort of books they wanted for their children.

  6. Philip in beret, aged 25. (Reproduced by kind permission of Philip Pullman.)

  The results were extremely positive. Although occasionally shaken by the sometimes controversial choice of subject matter in this new writing, the parents all agreed at a further meeting that the authors in question were treating it sensitively and responsibly. There would therefore be no objections to such books appearing in the library. For Pullman, this was an extra significant victory. It signalled to him that writing for the young was now free from many of the restrictions that once used to bear down on authors trying to tell teenagers the truth as they saw it. This realisation was another important step in his decision to become a children’s novelist himself.

  Still writing three pages a day, Pullman’s first illustrated children’s novel, Count Karlstein, or the Ride of the Demon Huntsman, was published in 1972. He has since written that putting on this story first as a school play while he was still a teacher was the greatest fun he had ever had in his life. Ghosts, slapstick and special effects abounded in a story involving orphan fugitives, a wicked uncle and numerous near escapes. Narrated to her brother by Hildi, a brave and resourceful child, in some ways anticipating Lyra in the years to come, good finally overcomes evil in the most satisfying way. It was followed by a couple of adult novels, but Pullman only really hit his stride as a popular children’s writer with The Ruby in the Smoke, published in 1985. Always a fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s great detective Sherlock Holmes, he set out to write a similarly exciting crime story of the type that the children he had been teaching would really enjoy.

  7. Philip, arms akimbo with walking stick, aged 26. (Reproduced by kind permission of Philip Pullman.)

  The end result was four gripping novels largely set in late 19th-century London, combining the traditional Victorian detective story with modern touches drawn from a range of popular films and fiction. Plots race along, packed with scenes of high drama and suspense. But Pullman also provides his own radical take on the social and political assumptions of that period. Evil is still represented by outsize villains, but also by social injustice and extreme poverty. Sally Lockhart, the lead character, starts as a sixteen-year-old orphan with a flair for detective work. Later an unmarried mother, after the murder of the man she loves, she is supported by a household of fellow workers. Like herself, these friends also operate mostly outside the norms of respectable society as it existed at the time.

  8. Patrice Aggs’s final spread from the illustrated version of Count Karlstein (Philip Pullman, Count Karlstein, or the Ride of the Demon Huntsman, Corgi Yearling, 1991. Illustrations copyright © 1991 Patrice Aggs. Reproduced by permission of A.P. Watt Ltd on behalf of Patrice Aggs.)

  Well received without ever becoming best-sellers, the first of the four titles were televised by the BBC in 2006, with Billie Piper playing Sally. A second instalment appeared a year later but there are no plans currently for televising the other two.

  These and subsequent stories made it possible financially for Pullman to change to a part-time job at Westminster College, Oxford, where he was Senior Lecturer in English for the next eight years, retiring in 1996. This post involved teaching prospective teachers, with Pullman specialising in a course on storytelling. Training young teachers how to put across stories to children in the most effective way, Pullman used to narrate favourite tales himself by way of an object lesson, concentrating particularly on Greek myths. The fearsome harpies of Homer’s Odyssey are not the only figures from these great myths to make a later appearance in His Dark Materials. The constant re-visiting of these most famous of stories also further convinced him of the appeal good narrative has for all ages, given a clear plot and a lively sense of adventure – exactly the characteristics he was to take into his own writing.

  9. Four illustrations from Victorian penny dreadfuls. The melodrama of the penny dreadful is well captured

  by Pullman’s Sally Lockhart novels. (Reproduced by permission of the British Library.)

  Now with two sons, James and Thomas, he would henceforth spend each writing day shutting himself away in his shed at the bottom of the garden which – like Roald Dahl before him – gave him the temporary, total isolation he needed. He once said that if he were to have a dæmon – the type of animal guardian angel found throughout His Dark Materials – it would probably be a jackdaw or a magpie. His description of the particular shed in which he writes gives some idea as to why these particular birds came to mind:

  My shed is a twelve foot by eight foot wooden structure, with electricity, insulation, heating, a carpet, the table where I write (which is covered in an old kilim rug), my exorbitantly expensive Danish tilting-in-all-directions orthopaedic gas-powered swivelling chair, my old computer, printer and scanner (i.e. they don’t work anymore but I’m too mean to throw them out), manuscripts, drawings, apple cores, spiders’ webs, dust, books in tottering heaps all over the floor and on every horizontal surface, about a thousand jiffy bags from books for review which I’m also too mean to throw away, a six-foot-long stuffed rat (the Giant Rat of Sumatra from a production of a Sherlock Holmes play I wrote for the Polka Theatre), a saxophone, a guitar, dozens of masks of one sort or another, piles and piles of books and more books and still more books, a heater, an old armchair filled to capacity with yet more books, a filing cabinet that I haven’t managed to open for eighteen months because of all the jiffy bags and books which have fallen in front of it in a sort of landslide, more manuscripts, more drawings, broken pencils, sharpened pencils, dust, dirt, bits of chewed carpet from when my young pug Hogarth comes to visit, stones of every kind: a cobblestone from Prague, a bit of Mont Blanc, a bit of Cape Cod … On and on the list goes. It is a filthy abominable tip. No-one would go in there unless they absolutely had to. I enter it each morning with reluctance and leave as soon as I can.

  10. Philip with his son Jamie, in about 1980. (Reproduced by kind permission of Philip Pullman.)

  This quotation provides a vivid impression of Pullman himself. Interested in everything that comes his way, self-deprecating but also very much his own master, quizzical, forthright and bursting with ideas, he is an excellent speaker as well as a brilliant writer. His enthusiasm even for the contents of his old shed is typical of his gener
ally positive attitude towards the whole of life itself. He is also a generous man, always happy to praise those other children’s authors that he reads and enjoys. When he writes in His Dark Materials that heaven should be seen not as another place but as very much where we are at the moment, there is no doubt that he is also referring to the continual joy he finds in his own life, not least in his own family and in the later arrival of four grandchildren.

  The Firework-Maker’s Daughter, published in 1995, once again has a sparky girl as its heroine. Unable to become a recognised firework-maker because of her sex, she still triumphs through courage and determination, seeing off an initially terrifying visit to the great Razvani, residing in his so-called Grotto of the Fire-Fiend. Once there she encounters a procession of weeping and wailing ghosts, anticipating the haunted spirits later found in His Dark Materials. She also discovers that the flames apparently surrounding Razvani are illusions, as he is the first to agree. Winner of the Smarties Book Prize for that year, it was adapted for the operatic stage in 2013 by composers Glyn Maxwell and David Bruce, receiving its first performances at The Royal Opera House.

  Just as successful, Clockwork, or All Wound Up, published the following year, is another splendidly spooky tale aimed at young readers. It features a murderous wind-up model and a young prince with a mechanical heart that is gradually rusting away. The villain is Karl, a sullen apprentice who enters into a pact with the devil. He is eventually murdered by his own ingeniously created robot. Gretl, an innkeeper’s daughter, also plays a leading role. Pullman also showed evidence here of becoming interested in some of the broader issues raised in this otherwise cheerfully melodramatic story.

  The whole idea of a wind-up robot that has no choice but to obey is linked by him to Isaac Newton’s model of a mechanistic universe, within which one scientific event will always necessarily follow another when the same conditions apply. But since the development of the study of quantum mechanics, scientists now take a much less deterministic view of why things happen as they do. Pullman has always been up to date with these intellectual changes, attracted to the idea that the inherent instability of all matter ensures there will always be uncertainty when it comes to understanding the world we live in. He therefore makes light of mechanistic theories in one of the boxes for the author’s own comments scattered throughout the text of this story. But towards the end he also suggests that in storytelling the reverse is true. Once a narrator has created characters, they must then follow particular paths because of the people they are. In this sense, Pullman is declaring himself as an author still writing in the tradition where characters largely do as they are told by a narrator holding all the cards. Moments of ambiguity and textual uncertainty are not and never have been for him. The same could be said of his moral outlook in his fiction, where good and bad characters are clearly announced from the start and tend to stay that way for the rest of the story.

  Throughout the story, other opinions of Pullman’s are also included in different boxes, on topics ranging from clockwork figures in general, to the artistic temperament, the soul, winning and losing, doctors, wolves and anything else that takes his fancy. These boxes are reminiscent of those odd facts or digressions that teachers sometimes slip into their lessons to keep their pupils interested, suggesting what a very good teacher Pullman himself must have been. But they also indicate an author ready to move on to fiction dealing with more complex issues aimed at adult readers as well as at older children.

  11. Patrice Aggs’s advertisement appears at the back of the illustrated version of Count Karlstein (Philip Pullman, Count Karlstein, or the Ride of the Demon Huntsman, Corgi Yearling, 1991. Illustrations copyright © 1991 Patrice Aggs. Reproduced by permission of A.P. Watt Ltd on behalf of Patrice Aggs.)

  His next illustrated story for younger readers, I was a Rat! Or The Scarlet Slippers was the first of his books to be made into a full-length film by the BBC in 2001. Its main character is one of the rats that was changed into a pageboy in the story of Cinderella but who never manages to change back again. Kidnapped by an unscrupulous showman, he escapes to join a band of young robbers and after being caught is condemned to death. But he is saved by the Princess Aurelia, whose secret is that she is the former Cinderella. But she confesses to the rat boy, that being a princess is not all it is cracked up to be. ‘I don’t think it’s what you are that matters,’ she tells him. ‘I think it’s what you do.’

  Elsewhere in the story attacks on pompous, unfeeling authority, insensitive teachers, vindictive newspapers and bleak orphanages are all typical of an author who is always on the side of the vulnerable and misunderstood. Hope resides with those humans for whom love and kindness are more important than greed and power. Although this story ends happily, there are also moments that have much in common with sections of His Dark Materials, particularly the image of an orphaned child up against a heartless organisation, which has overtones of Lyra’s plight. The decision taken at one point to exterminate the rat boy recalls the similarly pitiless cruelty shown by the scientists and their masters in the hideous camp where Lyra is briefly imprisoned.

  Pullman’s life changed altogether with the publication of Northern Lights in 1995 (titled The Golden Compass in America), The Subtle Knife in 1997 and The Amber Spyglass in 2000. His Dark Materials, the name given to this great trilogy, went on to sell fifteen million copies and was translated into 40 languages, leaving him with a secure income and therefore the option to go on writing whenever and whatever he liked. This best-selling work was also a critical success. In 1996 Northern Lights won both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian’s Children’s Fiction Prize. In 2001 The Amber Spyglass won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award (now known as the Costa Award), the first time this prize has ever been awarded for a children’s book. In 2003 His Dark Materials was adapted in two parts for the stage by Nicholas Wright, opening at London’s National Theatre to packed houses. Produced by Nicholas Hytner, Anna Maxwell Martin played Lyra, Patricia Hodge took on Mrs Coulter and Timothy Dalton was an appropriately smouldering Lord Asriel. Dæmons were designed by Michael Curry, appearing as shapes lit from within worked by silent operators dressed in black.

  In the same year the BBC presented the trilogy on Radio 4, adapted into three radio plays. It also issued a complete recording of the trilogy on audiobook, narrated by the author and with a cast including Joanna Wyatt as Lyra, Alison Dowling as Mrs Coulter and Sean Barrett reading both Lord Asriel and Iorek the bear. In 2004 Pullman was granted a CBE in the New Year’s Honours list, and a number of universities have awarded him honorary degrees since. In 2007, The Golden Compass, a film adaptation of Northern Lights, was released. Admired for its special effects, it was not an outstanding critical or box office success, and future plans for filming the other two novels of the trilogy were finally abandoned.

  In 2006 Northern Lights was chosen by readers as the Carnegie of Carnegies, out of all the other titles that have won this coveted medal since it was first awarded in 1936. More writing also followed, and in 2007 Pullman started on The Book of Dust, a three volume work relating to His Dark Materials, with the first instalment appearing in 2017. To those who have previously accused him of only focusing on the evils of organised religion he has said: ‘This is a big subject and I’m writing a big, big book in order to deal precisely with that question.’

  Ill health since 2007 has been a factor in this long writing process, along with time off that he could now afford to take in order to continue with other interests, such as wood carving and illustration, with these skills on view in the tiny pictures opposite chapter headings in Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife. He has also greatly enjoyed writing the text for a comic strip story, The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship. Illustrated by Fred Fordham and serialised in The Phoenix, an up-market weekly British comic, the whole story first appeared in Britain and America as a graphic novel in early 2017. Once again, different times and places become an issue as John Blake, a research scientist
, is condemned to sail between the centuries after an experiment goes badly wrong. Up against him is the all-powerful Dahlberg Corporation, whose evil intentions constitute a terrible threat to all concerned.

  Pullman has also taken up a number of causes during the last two decades. Elected President of the Society of Authors, he has written eloquently against what he saw as the crippling restrictiveness running through the recommendations of the National Curriculum where the teaching of English was concerned. Nearer home, he joined protests about the proposal to build new accommodation on the site of Castle Mill, the last working boatyard on the Oxford canal. He described this as ‘a watery, raffish, amiable, trickster-like world of boat dwellers and horse dealers and alchemists – very ancient, quite unmistakable, entirely unique.’ Much of Lyra’s early adventures in Northern Lights took place in identical surroundings. The proposal still went through, though with some modifications.

  He has also been a vocal campaigner on a number of other issues. In 2008, he led a campaign against the introduction of age bands on the covers of children’s books, saying: ‘It’s based on a one-dimensional view of growth, which regards growing older as moving along a line like a monkey climbing a stick: now you’re seven, so you read these books; and now you’re nine so you read these.’ More than 1,200 authors, booksellers, illustrators, librarians and teachers joined this campaign.