Quotes of the Day
What was your involvement in the staging of His Dark Materials and what do you think of the end results? They invited me to come and look in on rehearsals and I've seen every stage of the script development. It's been a joy to be on the edges. And when I finally saw it in the stage I was absolutely thrilled. I never thought it could be staged. It was [National Theatre director] Nicholas Hytner who read the books and decided he wanted the stage rights ... he's a great director and the National is the only place with the technical resources to do it.
Nicholas Wright [who adapted the books] had to conceive of it very differently. For the stage it has to be metaphorical rather than literal. In cinema, with CGI, you can have a snake coming out of your sleeve and turning into a moth and flying around your head and talking to you; you can have what look like real polar bears wearing armor — that's easy. On the stage you have to rely on theatrical conventions and on the audience making a leap of imagination to join you — and the result of that is very intense if it comes off. But the most important part is the story. And thanks to Nicholas Wright, the integrity and the line of the story are very strong.
Does it bother you what other people do with your work or ideas? I would, if the condition of its being adapted was that all the books had to be withdrawn from print. But the books are going to still to be there. And anyway, once a story leaves your desk it goes into the hands of the reader — they see things in it that you didn't think were there. So once you've published a book, you've lost control of it, and if you want to fret about that then don't publish it. But to do something major with it, the main thing was to make sure it got into the best hands. I couldn't think of any better hands than Nicholas Hytner and the National Theatre and the film company working on it [New Line Cinema, which produced Lord of the Rings]. They know how to make a big story in three parts, if anybody does. So I'm very confident.
How advanced are plans to film His Dark Materials? There's a script for the first film which Tom Stoppard has finished and they're about to appoint a director. I hope it will be someone who will take the story seriously and not be intoxicated by all the opportunities for lots of action. At the center of the story is a very simple thing: a girl and a boy growing up ,who realize they love each other.
Are you an admirer of Tolkien? Lord of the Rings is a very well told story — my criticism of Tolkien is that the story he tells is not that interesting because it leaves out at least half of human life, namely the sexual element. They've had to beef up the love themes [in the film] as an excuse to have any women in it all. Otherwise it would just be public school chaps and oiks (or Orcs!) fighting. So I don't learn anything from Tolkien about being a human being and that's what's most interesting in a story.
As well as the play, your trilogy was just voted third on the BBC's Big Read poll of Britain's favorite books. Are you enjoying your celebrity? To be honest, no. It's a curious thing: you don't know how famous you are until complete strangers stop you in the street to talk. As for the Big Read, would I rather have it than not? Yes. Am I willing to make myself available to take part in all these shindigs? I suppose. But my job is to write books and anything else is a gift of my time, and I give it parsimoniously. And it's very hard to find the time to write, so I'm putting a stop to it. The interviews I'm doing now will be the last for a very long time to come
His Dark Materials has provoked a great variety of responses and analyses. Do you feel misunderstood? It goes back to this business of loss of control. The last thing I want to say is you've got it wrong. Because then you enter a kind of fundamentalist mode where you're saying you've got to understand it this way, not that way ... that's dreadful. People are at perfect liberty to find in my story whatever they want to find and I wouldn't dream of saying to someone they've got it wrong. I'm just very flattered and happy that lots of people are reading my books.
What about those in the Christian church who have taken exception to it? They're attacking it because they themselves are misreading the Christian story; because they believe it's literally true. So I'm not too bothered. They used to criticize me on the grounds that I was inverting morality; that I was saying good is evil and evil is good. When the whole story was there it was quite clear that's not what I was doing. Because the good that the story celebrates is something that everybody can agree with.
But why, as an atheist, did you choose to cast the story in Christian terms? Because I was brought up a Christian — I was baptized, my grandfather was a clergyman, I went to Sunday School and to church almost every day of my life. I know the Bible pretty well and I know the prayer book even better. It's what I know. It's also the tradition that underlies a very great deal of the literature that means much to me and to western Europe. The Christian creation, fall and redemption stories are very interesting ones. I happen to think they're not true. It's people who think they're literally true that cause the trouble.
So when did you stop believing? It gradually fell away in my teen years. But I remain sympathetic to the religious impulse; the instinct to feel awe and wonder at the universe, to have a sense of moral relations with other conscious beings and unconscious beings such as animals. We're involved in a whole network of relations of trust and responsibility, joy and exploitation. It's when we become conscious of this, that the bleak religious questions come to mind: Why are we here? What are we for? Is there any purpose to our life beyond what we make of it? The conclusion I reach is the one the story reaches: we are responsible, we can't disclaim responsibility. If we want things to be right, to be good, we have to make them so.
How consciously was His Dark Materials written as a riposte to the Christian fantasies of Tolkien or C. S. Lewis? Tolkien was a Catholic and a great believer in the authority of the church; Lewis was an Ulster Protestant and came from that tradition of personal wrestling with God. In Tolkien you never had to decide about these questions; they were already decided ... so everything in it is rather trivial. In [Lewis's] Narnia books these things are not trivial; the ultimate destiny of the children hangs on how they behave. But the answers Lewis came up with are abominable and appalling. The child Susan at the end of The Last Battle is excluded from salvation because she's become too interested in lipstick and nylons. She's growing up through the natural stages of development every teenager does and becoming aware of her body. But Lewis hated it vehemently and punished with eternal damnation the one child that succumbs to it. That's so anti-life ... But this is the great Christian teaching sold in every Christian bookshop. So yes, I was writing against Lewis but it's not enough just to do that.
As a onetime teacher, what do you hope children will find in your books? Pullman: I would be very flattered, gratified and very happy if they find in my books the kind of things I found in the books I love — namely the joys of rereading my favorite bits over and over again. [When I was teaching] I wasn't constrained by a national curriculum ... I was free to play about with stories, to give children the experience of hearing and reading stories and poems without the constant nagging to interpret, criticize and analyze. That can be very interesting but the beginning has got to be enchantment; once you're half in love with it that's when you want to see how it works.
I also despair of the way in which children are increasingly protected from the world. I remember what it was like to play outside in the late summer evenings. Now we're scared of the traffic, of pedophiles etcetera, so we have prevented our children from some of the great experiences of life: to be bored, to have to find your own entertainment; to experience real darkness; real silence. They're frightfully deprived of these physical sensations and interactions with what the world is made of. 
- His Dark Materials author Philip Pullman talks to TIME's Michael Brunton