The Story Master

KO: In your fantasy trilogy, you've created an entire universe in 1,000-plus pages. Did you know at the beginning where you were going?

PP: Yes, I knew exactly where it was going to end. I knew it was going to end in a garden.... I knew that Lyra was going to meet Will, and I knew that Will was going to have to search for his father...But I didn't know the little things on the way. I didn't know about the Gallivespians [the tiny people less than a human-hand high], for example.

KO: What about peoples' daemons--their spirit companions that take the form of animals?

PP: I really didn't have them in mind when I was describing the book to my publisher before I even began it. I didn't know how I'd make this sort of fantasy work, and I tried for a long time to make it work, to write the first chapter without knowing about daemons. And it wouldn't get going, really, it wouldn't sort of start easily. And suddenly one day, I found myself realizing that, of course, Lyra had a daemon [a spiritual companion]. And from then on, it became much easier.

KO: Why are daemons the opposite sex of their humans?

PP: If I had a spirit companion, if you'd like to call it [that], I would like to think that it was the opposite sex because there's a completeness about the relationship between [the] two sexes in that way. That's not to say that it can't happen otherwise. Because, I think, at one point, Lyra mentions that occasionally people are born who have daemons of the same sex as themselves. And this is regarded not as being some sort of freakish thing, which they have to be shunned for, but as being a rather unusual gift.

KO: One of His Dark Materials' themes is the often negative power of organized religion. Do you see that occurring in contemporary society?

PP: Yes, I do. I knew I'd get into trouble for this, I knew there'd be a certain amount of critical reaction to my criticism of the churches. But it seems to me, if you look at human history, and if you look at the present day, too, in many parts of the world, that organized religion--especially those religions that have a monotheistic god--have been responsible historically for enormous amounts of persecution, of suffering and cruelty. And this is often forgotten.... It's not acknowledged, especially in popular fiction and fiction... that's going to be read by young people. I wanted to give a sort of historical answer to the, so to speak, the propaganda on behalf of religion that you get in, for example, C. S. Lewis.

KO: Did your early religious experiences shape that outlook?

PP: Yes. My grandfather was a clergyman in the Church of England.... He headed an old village church, and he was the rector. It was a country parish, and I was brought up in his household for a lot of my childhood. So all through my childhood, I went to church every Sunday. I went to Sunday school. I know the Bible very well. I know the hymns and the prayer book very well--and this is the old, authorized King James Version of the Bible, and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer that used to be used in English churches, and the old hymns that used to be sung.

KO

PP: I think it is. Because of the traditional emphasis in religions that seek to control our behavior by apportioning, you know, punishment or reward in an afterlife. The emphasis of those religions is that this world is the place of sin and evil and that the material world is very inferior to the spiritual world, which is a sort of realm of gas and nonphysical stuff that exists. And we get there after we die. If we're good, we go to Heaven and we--well, nobody really knows what Heaven's like, and nobody really knows what Hell's like.... It seemed to me that people waste so much of their lives waiting for what's going to happen after they die. And this world is the only world we know or we can be certain of. And it's a place of the most extraordinary and exquisite beauty and delight. This is one of the reasons why I sort of go against traditional [church] teaching in saying that angels are superior to human beings. I've sort of inverted that and say, angels envy our flesh because our flesh gives us sensations of such delight. Imagine the joy of smelling coffee on cold mornings--angels would love to sense things like that, but they haven't got our senses. What I was trying to do, though, was really reawaken readers to the glory, the wonder of our physical senses.

KO: I think you've accomplished that. You have an amazing ability to paint pictures with language.

PP: Thank you very much. I'm happy if I can do that, because that's certainly what I intend to do. My aim is always to make it perfectly clear to the reader what's happening. In other words, I don't want there to be any doubt as to where we are or what's going on or who's present and who's speaking and what the weather's like and where the light's coming from. I want to make it as clear as I possibly can. So, I'm glad if I've succeeded.

KO: When you write, do you see pictures in your head?

PP: Yes, I do. I don't compose it like a film script, as I know some writers of novels do. But I am aware that when I'm reading a novel, those are the things I like to know. I like to know what time of day it is when a scene takes place. I like to know what the weather's doing--even if we're inside, I like to know what the weather's like outside, simply because that can give me a sort of background sense of the atmosphere of the scene that's going on. And so I like to supply, when I'm writing, I like to supply the things that I would want if I were reading.

KO: Did you once teach middle school?

PP: Yes, that's right, for about 12 years.

KO: Are you thinking of your students when you write?

PP: No.... I'm not thinking of any readers at all. I'm thinking just of myself and of the story. But the experience that I had when I was teaching, it does remain with me--not because I know what 12-year-old kids are like, although that's probably true as well. One of the things I used to do when I was teaching, I used to tell a lot of stories.... Year after year, several times a year, I used to tell Greek legends and fairy tales and folk tales--because, well, at first I thought it would be good for the kids to know some of these stories that they probably wouldn't get from anywhere else. And secondly, the more I did it, the more I found myself enjoying the storytelling. Every year I used to tell, three times to three different classes, the story of the Iliad and the story of the Odyssey, from beginning to end. So I must have told them 36 times. So I know them very well, those stories. And also other tales about the Greek gods and heroes, so that they knew who Apollo and Aphrodite and Hercules and Prometheus were, and things like that. And in doing that and in retelling these stories, you know, three times a week for 12 years or whatever it was, I got to know the stories well.

But also it taught me an immense amount about storytelling. And I learned what sort of things I can do and what sort of things I can't do. For example, I can make people want to know what happens next. But I find it much harder to make them laugh. When I try and tell a funny story, it generally falls flat. I can make them laugh, but incidentally on the way to doing something else. Another thing I can do is, I can bring a scene vividly before their eyes. But something I can't do is tell a story that is set in the present day in an ordinary, everyday family with ordinary, everyday things going on. Some writers can do that, do it brilliantly well.... I can't do that. So by telling these stories, you see, I not only taught myself about the stories, but I also learned about myself as a storyteller. And what I can do and what I can't do.

KO: What was your own childhood like?

PP: It was confused, like many people's, and it was mixed in terms of happy and unhappy. My grandfather, [whom] I told you about, I loved him dearly. He was the center of my life. He was the sun around whom my emotional life revolved as a boy. My father died in a plane accident when I was quite young, when I was seven years old. He was in the Royal Air Force, and we traveled about a lot in my childhood because of that. We lived in what's now Zimbabwe, which was then southern Rhodesia, when I was about six or seven. Then we went to Australia because my mother married another pilot in the Royal Air Force, and my stepfather was also sent all over the world. So before I was 11, I'd sort of gone effectively on several long sea voyages because that was the way you traveled in those days: you went by sea. And so quite a lot of my childhood was spent at sea, which is unusual.

I'm very thankful that I lived at a time before universal air travel meant that I didn't have a chance to realize how big the world is. Because when you fly, you don't know--you get in a plane and you watch the movie and you try and fall asleep and you eat too many meals and drink too much wine and you get up feeling rather befuddled eight hours later in Minneapolis. But you might as well be in...Timbuktu for all you know of the journey in between. When you go by sea, you know how far it is, because it's taken you a long time to get there. And the weather changes on the way as you go over the Equator. It gets calmer, it gets hotter, the sea gets stiller, and you go down towards the Cape of Good Hope and the sea changes color and it becomes green and blue and the waves change shape. There'll be much longer waves [so] that the ship plunges up and down as well as rocking from side to side. And all these things are--it's coming back to what we talked about earlier on, this anchoring experience in the physical world. If you have felt in your body the difference between the Southern Hemisphere and the Northern Hemisphere, you really have experienced it. And so a lot of my childhood was spent doing that.

When I was 11, we stayed in one place for the next seven or eight years, which was north Wales. I had a wonderful time there. 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.

KO: Now I'd like to ask you about something that's very dear to my heart. You've created some remarkably strong female characters who face dangers with great courage and energy--Lyra, Sally Lockhart, the firework-maker's daughter. And you even--and I appreciate this--have created a female character like Mrs. Coulter, who perpetrates a lot of evil. Did you consciously set out to do that?

PP: No, I didn't set out to do it. I don't have any sort of political ax to grind in this context, political or social. I just find myself writing about the stories that I'm writing about and the characters I'm writing about. I'm very glad to provide strong images of girls and women, because I'm generally in sympathy with feminism and all it entails. But I certainly don't think--as I felt some writers have demonstrated--I don't think that in order to show girls being strong, you have to show boys being weak. And so I try to make my men, my male characters, admirable and worthy in their ways as well. Besides, I think it's more interesting to read about strong people than about people who are weak or uninteresting--or it's more interesting to read about people with great flaws rather than little flaws, similarly.

PP: It seems to me that a lot of what we call fantasy does a number of things very well. It tells stories very well and it's very inventive and so on. But what it typically does not do, because typically writers of fantasy aren't interested in it, it doesn't talk about what it means to be a human being. It doesn't talk about what it's like to be alive or to grow up or to have a romantic relationship or to--you know, all the things that we get in realistic fiction. And those are the things that I'm most interested in, as a reader and as a writer and as a human being. And so most of my deepest and profoundest satisfactions in fiction, in reading fiction, have come not from, for example, Tolkien, but from, for example, George Eliot or Jane Austen. In other words, from writers whose work is solidly and firmly based in what we recognize as the real world. So, when I found myself writing this book, what I wanted to do was to use the apparatus of fantasy in order to do what writers of realism are more typically interested in doing, namely, to explore this business about being a human being--what it feels like and what it's like, what it means for us to grow up, to pass away from our childhood, to suffer, to learn, to grow, to develop, to die, and so on. And that's what I mean by saying that it's not really a work of fantasy. It's as realistic as I could make it.