In 2008 the well-known writer Philip Pullman was given an honorary Professorship in the Department of English at Bangor University, North Wales. As a graduate of that department (in 1974) I was invited to attend a reunion at which Philip Pullman gave an inaugural talk.
The event was highly enjoyable, not least because of the
chance to meet again some people I had not seen for more than 30 years. I
discovered, for example, that my first tutor in English, who had started in his
job on the same day that I started as a student, was now the Head of
Department!
In his address on Saturday 9th February, Philip Pullman gave
some insights to the world of fantasy fiction and his reasons for writing. I
was also able to have a short private conversation with him later in the day
(when I took the accompanying photo), and found him to be a fascinating person
to talk to. He is a very level-headed man who can take criticism in his stride,
but he is also convinced of the need to speak out when freedom of thought and
speech are under attack.
His Dark Materials
The work for which he is best known is "His Dark
Materials", a trilogy of novels about the growing-up of two children from
parallel worlds who are able to meet and work together to fight the forces of
darkness.
He sees the trilogy as a version of the Blakean theme of
innocence and experience, but experience is, for Pullman, something to be
welcomed and the loss of innocence is not a matter for regret.
"Children", he said, "do not play at being children. They play
at being grown-ups".
The first of the three novels is known as "Northern
Lights" in the UK and several other countries where it has been published
in translation, but as "The Golden Compass" in the United States and
elsewhere. He said that the reason for the American change of title was too
boring to mention, so he didn't mention it! However, he did say that in France
the title is (in French) "The Kingdom of the North" - "but
that's the French for you!"
The Golden Compass had recently been issued as a film, to
great acclaim. Pullman was clearly not displeased with the film, although he
said that it "bears a strange resemblance to a book I once wrote".
The ending of the book and the film are not the same, although the filming did
originally include the final chapter, which takes the reader forward to
anticipate the second volume, "The Subtle Knife". This was because of
a doubt on the studio's part as to whether films would follow that covered the
rest of the trilogy. There would be little point in ending with a cliff-hanger
if it was never resolved.
The film has attracted criticism, especially in the United
States, for its anti-Christian stance, which is apparent from the activities of
"The Magisterium", a thinly-veiled version of the Roman Catholic
Church. This is not a problem for Pullman, who is only the latest in a long
line of British authors, from Charles Dickens to J. K. Rowling, to have faced
American wrath.
When I asked Pullman about my own idea for writing a novel
on a highly controversial subject, he was all for it. Books don't worry people
any more, he told me, it's only when the mass media produce versions of them
that the self-appointed guardians of religion and morality feel the need to
tell the rest of us what influences we are allowed to absorb.
Other work
Philip Pullman is not a one-book writer. He had been writing
long before he began the seven-year process of producing his most famous work.
He was a teacher who clearly enjoyed the business of opening
young minds, but, "I stopped being a teacher when I got worse at it".
He has written a number of "fairy stories" and looks forward to
writing more of them, a genre that clearly gives him great satisfaction.
Away from the writing (longhand in biro, apparently), he is currently
passionate about saving the Oxford boatyard in the Jericho district of the city
where the Oxford Canal joins the Thames. The Oxford bargees feature as
important characters in "His Dark Materials", but Pullman admitted to
me that he has yet to take to the waterways himself.
In conversation
He warns against stretching fantasy further than can be
justified by the needs of the story to hand. I had a question of this type,
wondering how the concept of daemons ("souls" in animal forms that
always accompany humans) could work in the context of a drama production. He
had also been asked in the past how characters in Lyra's world could play
sports - thirty daemons charging around a rugby field would cause problems
surely - and there was the question of how daemons are born.
However, should the need ever arise to explain any of this,
he was sure that explanations would be found! In answer to another question
from me, he also pointed out that a storyteller is not required to fill in all
the gaps of a character's existence. Characters in fiction must have enormous
bladders, I said, as they never seem to need to urinate. That was true, he
replied, but suppose somebody found a toilet bowl full of blood - that would be
a good reason for making a character want to have a pee!
Philip Pullman is a writer who knows how to tell a good
story and make important statements about the human condition at the same time.
To those people with fixed opinions about what the rest of us should believe,
he is something of a bugbear, but as an apostle of the open mind he has few to
match him.
©John Welford
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