In 2014, he supported the Let Books Be Books campaign to stop children’s books being labelled as ‘for girls’ or ‘for boys’, saying: ‘I’m against anything, from age-ranging to pinking and blueing, whose effect is to shut the door in the face of children who might enjoy coming in. No publisher should announce on the cover of any book the sort of readers the book would prefer. Let the readers decide for themselves.’ He and other authors also threatened to stop visiting schools in protest at new laws requiring them to be vetted to work with youngsters. Before that, in 2011, he backed a campaign to stop 600 library closures in England calling it a ‘war against stupidity’. Speaking at a conference organised by The Library Campaign, he insisted that:
‘The book is second only to the wheel as the best piece of technology human beings have ever invented. A book symbolises the whole intellectual history of mankind; it’s the greatest weapon ever devised in the war against stupidity. Beware of anyone who tries to make books harder to get at. And that is exactly what these closures are going to do – oh, not intentionally, except in a few cases; very few people are stupid intentionally; but that will be the effect. Books will be harder to get at. Stupidity will gain a little ground.’
As a long-time enthusiast of William Blake, and president of the Blake Society, Pullman led a campaign in 2014 to buy the Sussex cottage in Felpham where the poet lived for three years. For Pullman: ‘It isn’t beyond the resources of a nation that can spend enormous amounts of money on acts of folly and unnecessary warfare, a nation that likes to boast about its literary heritage, to find the money to pay for a proper memorial and a centre for the study of this great poet and artist.’ In 2015 the little house, where Blake originally wrote ‘And did those feet in ancient time’ was finally bought for public use by the Blake Society.
Pullman is an emotional man, laughing, shuddering and on occasions weeping over his stories as they unfold. His main characters often seem to make their presence known to him almost personally. In the case of Lyra in His Dark Materials, he has said it was as if he could hear her voice and knew precisely what she looked like. Left wing in his politics, he sees his writing as part of a dissenting tradition stretching back once again to his particular hero William Blake.
A central part of Pullman’s philosophy as a writer is that people should be judged by what they do rather than what they say. This rests upon another assumption, which is that since everyone always has the power of choice, it is up to them to see that they make the right ones. His own life could be seen as an example of someone who has chosen the positive rather than the negative path. An unsettled childhood involving constant moves, a succession of new schools, a dead father, a stepfather and an often absent mother could have been seen as reason for resentment, both at the time and later on as well.
But Pullman has no such reservations, always choosing to celebrate the positive features of his life to date. For some, such optimism smacks of denial, with Pullman unwilling to register the anger and depression he might once have felt as a child, preferring instead to express it in his writing when it comes to portraying generally hateful villains. For others, probably including Pullman himself, his life is a story within which the love of important others plus the powers of his own imagination have provided all that he needed, both as man and boy. Taking the position that individuals – including himself – always have the power and ability to be ultimately responsible for the course of their own lives has enabled Pullman to write the positive stories that he has. This type of inner conviction, linked to his extraordinary powers of imagination, has been welcomed by multitudes of readers, both young and old. There have always been others, both in life and in literature, who take a far bleaker view of the power of any individual to shape their own lives to any significant degree. Pullman has never been one of these and has little sympathy with those who take this pessimistic view, particularly if they should also be writing for younger audiences in need of hope and belief at this stage of their lives.
But Pullman cannot be written off as the type of born optimist who can always find a positive in everything. He has also had experience of depression, which he has described as a time when ‘life and the meaning and the colour drains out of everything and leaves you indifferent, indifferent to your own self as well as anyone else’. He says more about this in a dialogue with Marie Bridge, as part of a series of conversations with authors and psychoanalysts held at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in 2003. He admits that his description of the feelings suffered by the witch Lena Feldt in The Subtle Knife after her dæmon was ravaged by a Spectre also represents his own personal experience of bad times too:
She felt a nausea of the soul, a hideous and sickening despair, a melancholy weariness so profound that she was going to die of it. Her last conscious thought was disgust with life: her senses had lied to her. The world was not made of energy and delight but of foulness, betrayal, and lassitude. Living was hateful and death was no better, and from end to end of the universe, this was the first and last and only truth.
Yet he still insists that the personal journey from initial innocence to ultimate wisdom always remains possible despite such hazards along the way. Following the German philosopher-writer Heinrich von Kleist, about whom more later, Pullman explains to his audience of psychoanalysts that the only way to re-enter the lost Paradise of childhood innocence is to ‘Go all the way around the world experiencing life and suffering and sorrow and trouble and difficulty, but learning all the while until eventually, if you live long enough, you will re-enter Paradise, as it were through the back door.’ And for Pullman in particular, the greatest stories offer the best guides as to what we can strive to achieve as humans over the course of a lifetime.
The particular journeys his main characters have to take in order to arrive where they want to be are indeed often of necessity hard and testing, requiring constant courage as well as an unwavering – though not unquestioning – faith in the whole enterprise at all stages. The temptation to give up at any time can only be countered by making a renewed effort, even in the toughest of conditions. If and when a particular battle is finally won, it may be at some personal cost. So although Pullman chooses a fantasy setting for his most important novels, his main characters still basically achieve their ends through hard work. The same could also be said of the author himself, shut away in his shed at the bottom of the garden and not allowing himself to leave until he has written the three pages per day that finally meet with the stringent and ever-demanding standards of his artistic approval.
12. Philip Pullman, taken c.1997. (Reproduced by permission of Scholastic Ltd.)
His Dark Materials
The Stories
Pullman’s great trilogy was written over a period of seven years and is around 1,300 pages long. Its cast ranges from scholarly Oxford dons to armoured bears, witches, angels, murderous Spectres and hideous harpies. It can be read at many different levels, from an adventure story to a parable about the essence of human nature and how this has been betrayed. As he puts it himself, it is also a story about what it means ‘to be human, to grow up, to suffer, and to learn’. It draws on a wide range of sources, from Ancient Greek myths, the Bible, Dante, John Milton and William Blake to Hollywood films, a Finnish telephone directory and the superstring theory developed from the study of quantum physics.
Partly arising from a suggestion by Pullman over lunch with his editor David Fickling that his next project might involve a re-writing of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the trilogy also draws on and develops themes and ideas found in his previous novels. Although it brings numbers of philosophical and scientific ideas into play, it is at base a work of imagination and should always be read as such. For Pullman, the story comes first before everything else, and he strongly believes that it is through stories that humans can best hope to understand both themselves and others. As a writer who has never gone in for too much forward planning, he also believes that as the story itself emerges, it always knows best, even whe
n it may occasionally seem to be going in an unexpected direction. Sometimes the extra meaning implicit in what he has written, in terms of how it then goes on to inform what happens in the rest of the trilogy, has only become clear to him well after the event.
13. ‘Nearer he drew, and many a walk traversed / Of stateliest covert, cedar, pine or palm’. (IX 434–435) (Source: Doré’s Illustrations for ‘Paradise Lost’, Gustave Doré. Copyright © 1993 by Dover Publications, Inc.)
The basic plot of the trilogy describes how two children, Lyra and Will, manage to overcome forces of oppression to establish a new order based on truth, honesty and love. In so doing, they repeat the original decision of Adam and Eve to seek full understanding and consciousness by eating from the tree of knowledge. But this time the two children, in their own symbolic re-enactment of this original act of defiance, manage to defeat a Church establishment which is still intent on condemning their determined search for freedom as a wicked rebellion. Involving a whole universe of different human, animal and supernatural players inhabiting a number of parallel worlds, Will and Lyra also have to sort out some personal difficulties with their own parents. They must, too, make a final decision about their growing feelings for each other, when it becomes clear that it will not be possible for them to live together in the same world now made fresh and new by their joint victory.
Northern Lights
This story opens with eleven-year-old Lyra Belacqua, accompanied as always by her dæmon Pantalaimon. This is the inseparable, visible spirit that is part of every child in her particular world and can change into any sort of animal. Only later, when an individual turns adult, does the dæmon finally stay in a fixed form for the rest of their life. Lyra and her dæmon are creeping through the darkened main hall of Jordan College, Oxford.
As there is no such college, this is in a world which, as the author says, is ‘like ours, but different in many ways’. Overhearing a plot by the Master of the College to poison Lord Asriel, the man she believes to be her uncle but who is in fact her father, Lyra prevents him from drinking a fatal draught. After that, she hears Lord Asriel tell colleagues about his discovery of another world running parallel with this one and his determination to explore it. He also talks about Dust, the normally invisible particles that cluster around living beings. During the rest of the evening, the Master of the College is forced to give up his plans to stop Lord Asriel’s supposedly dangerous enquiries from going any further.
In the coming weeks, Lyra becomes aware that some local children have been mysteriously disappearing, including her particular friend Roger, a kitchen boy and the son of a college servant. She also makes the acquaintance of the glamorous Mrs Coulter, without knowing that Mrs Coulter is her mother. Mrs Coulter then plans to take Lyra with her on an exciting journey to the North. But before this happens, the Master of the College, in conditions of the greatest secrecy, presents Lyra with an alethiometer, which he hopes will help protect her from the terrible dangers Lord Asriel seems intent on drawing both himself and his daughter into. Once she has learned to read it, this device will provide her with honest and accurate answers to all the questions she puts to it.
Things soon turn sour with Mrs Coulter, when Lyra learns that she plays an important role in the Church’s General Oblation Board. This organisation has been supervising the kidnapping of children from Oxford and elsewhere. The children are then taken far North to Bolvangar, where Lord Asriel is being held captive as well. Lyra runs away to try to free him. She makes contact with John Faa, the leader of the Oxford Gyptians, some tough water gypsies with whom Lyra has had numbers of high-spirited disputes in the past. But everyone is united now in the determination to find the missing children, and Lyra joins an expedition setting out to rescue them. While she is with the Gyptians, she finally learns the truth about who her parents are after talking to John Faa and his aged companion, Farder Coram.
Once the group reaches Lapland, Lyra meets Iorek Byrnison, a talking, armoured bear. He tells them where the lost children are being kept, and how they are being cut away from their dæmons in a hideous operation known as intercision. The Gyptians also meet the American aviator Lee Scoresby. He is named by Pullman after the actor Lee Van Cleef, who appeared in a number of films with Clint Eastwood, and William Scoresby, a real-life Arctic explorer. They hire him and his balloon for extra back-up. Lyra becomes friends with Serafina Pekkala too, a witch queen who reveals Lyra’s own particular destiny, which is to bring an end to destiny itself. The witch’s surname was drawn by Pullman at random from a Finnish phone directory.
As they near their destination, Lyra is kidnapped by a band of Tartars who take her to the special camp which houses the lost children. Scientists hired by the Church Oblation Board are removing the dæmons from the children who have been rounded up before they can reach adolescence. The Church believes that dæmons help attract Dust to the individual concerned, and that this Dust is synonymous with original sin. But Pullman describes Dust instead as the essence of all accumulated human consciousness. It is attracted to adults rather than to children since older people are less innocent and more experienced. If a dæmon is cut away before a child enters puberty, then Dust would no longer be drawn towards the same child once turned adult. And without dæmons everyone becomes much tamer and more manageable, so providing the Church with no trouble when it comes to maintaining and extending what in this world still remained its traditional near-total control.
Hiding under an assumed name after she hears that her mother has arrived at the camp, Lyra meets up again with Roger. Mrs Coulter then rescues her daughter when Lyra is about to be forced to undergo the operation herself. But her mother also wants to get her hands on Lyra’s alethiometer. With the help of Iorek the bear plus an army of friendly witches headed by Serafina Pekkala, Lyra escapes with Roger in Lee Scoresby’s balloon. This is then attacked by hordes of cliff-ghasts: large, venomous creatures with leather wings and hooked claws. Crashing to earth, Lyra is captured by another tribe of bears who turn out to be hostile. Tricking them into allowing Iorek into their midst, Lyra sees her great friend beat his rival Iofur in single combat. He can now once again take up his rightful leadership of this particular kingdom of the bears.
Lyra then finds Lord Asriel in order to give him the alethiometer she thought he needed, though he can now do without it. In return, he tells her of the great battle that led to the Church condemning Dust as a manifestation of the original sin committed when Eve ate the apple from the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. He now wants to travel to other worlds in order to trace the origin of all Dust. But when Lyra wakes up after a night’s rest, she finds that her father has departed, taking Roger with him. For in order to travel to another world, her father needs that flash of extra energy generated when a child is separated from his or her dæmon. Roger has been chosen to pay this heavy price. Too late to intervene, Lyra follows him and her father into another world, determined now to find out for herself what Dust is all about.
With an attempted murder in the first chapter, along with rumours of an imminent global war, Northern Lights gets off to a running start and maintains a fierce narrative pace to the end. Familiar conventions of children’s adventure stories abound, such as vital eavesdropping, kidnapping, rescues, last-minute escapes and hiding away to avoid capture. There are also some graphic fights involving victory over villainous-looking adversaries. Events on the emotional front are equally gripping, with a wicked mother pretending to be nice and a sulky father intent on getting his own way whatever the outcome. The main character, Lyra, who has to cope with all these situations is an immediately attractive presence, mischievous but brave, and at home within a wide social spectrum. Shrugging off any adult who tries to control her, she relishes the sort of independence denied to most children, who have always enjoyed reading about wild adventures within the consoling safety of their own homes.
If this were all, Pullman would have written a serviceable but unexceptional adventure story usin
g well-grounded but familiar plot devices. But by introducing the concept of Dust early on he brings in a new and highly charged dimension, full of meaning but ambiguous at the same time. Lyra is understandably puzzled by this phenomenon but is determined to find out more about it. More ominously for her, it seems as if she has also been chosen by the fates, whatever they are, to bring about the end of destiny itself. The universe, as cranky Professor Jotham Santelia explains to her towards the end, ‘is full of intentions’. Never quite sure what these intentions might be, Lyra and her readers advance towards the second volume knowing there is still all to play for.
The Subtle Knife
The narrative starts with Will Parry, a twelve-year-old boy living in modern-day England. Following the disappearance of his explorer-father John on an expedition to the North, Will now has to look after his mentally ill mother. He is taking her to a place of safety after their house has been raided by two sinister men intent on stealing a case of letters and documents belonging to his father. Will foils them, but rightly fears he may have unintentionally killed one of the men.
Running away after leaving his mother in the care of a kind, older friend, he comes across an almost invisible window in the air while walking through the Northern suburbs of Oxford. Passing through it, he finds he is in Cittàgazze, literally the city of the magpies, which acts as a type of crossroads between millions of different worlds. It is an eerie, empty, Italian type of town, only inhabited by children because of the existence of ghost-like Spectres that have fed on all the adults there, leaving them as zombies. There he meets Lyra, also lost in this alien world.
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