A labour of loathing

Peter Hitchens on the worship of Philip Pullman, who has set out to destroy Narnia

Whatever the atheist equivalent of canonisation is, they are doing it to the children’s author Philip Pullman. The full power of secular liberalism is being deployed to magnify his glorious name. Last year he won the Whitbread Prize, normally reserved for adult authors. Now Radio Four is handing over three of its precious Saturday afternoons for an adaptation of his trilogy, His Dark Materials. Nicholas Hytner is preparing Pullman’s works for the stage of the National Theatre, and Hollywood is hoping to do for him what it did for Tolkien. In early March he will be beatified through an interview with Melvyn Bragg on the South Bank Show. Why is he suddenly so important?

Here is the reason: Philip Pullman is the man who may succeed in destroying a country that the liberal intelligentsia loathe even more than they despise Britain. That country is Narnia, discovered long ago by millions of English-speaking children, and still beloved by many of them. Narnia is a conservative sort of place — religious, undecimalised, unmetricated, patriotic and hierarchical. But Narnia cannot be corrected, modernised, devolved or forced to join the euro. As a country of the mind, it remains defiantly independent for as long as the books are sold and read and their stories remembered. The creator of Narnia, C.S. Lewis, though dead almost 40 years, is the most influential Christian in modern British culture, not because of his faith but because his stories are so good. Parents and grandparents, uncles and aunts, seeking literate and well-crafted stories for their young, have been all but compelled to turn to this odd Ulsterman’s works for the last half-century. They know that these gifts will actually be read, despite the archaic slang used by the 1940s children who are their heroes and heroines.

Most, regrettably, do not care or even notice that the seven Narnia books convey a Christian and conservative message, but among the enlightened classes many adults are unhappy about Lewis’s confident and potent faith, unashamed and unfashionable, conveyed through parables and allegory and perhaps destined to stay with his readers all their lives. The cultural elite would like to wipe out this pocket of resistance. They have successfully expelled God from the schools, from the broadcast media and, for the most part, from the Church itself. They would much rather He was not sitting on the bookshelves of their offspring. Philip Pullman allows them to remove Him, and replace The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with Pullman’s very different country of the mind —rebel angels, friendly daemons and witches who are not wicked but good (though Pullman also has a wardrobe).

Pullman’s stories are crammed with the supernatural and the mystical, and take place mainly in alternative worlds, most captivatingly of all in an Oxford recognisably the same place while utterly different. But while Narnia is under the care of a benevolent, kindly creator, Pullman’s chaotic universe has no ultimate good authority, controlling and redeeming all. God, or someone claiming to be God, dies meaninglessly in the third volume of his trilogy. There is life after death, but it is a dark, squalid misery from which oblivion is a welcome release. Pullman puts forward a complex theory of man’s true destiny, and his stories are a powerful epic that everyone should read. But many who buy these books for children and grandchildren would be surprised, and even shocked, if they knew just how vehemently Pullman despises the Christian Church, and how much he loathes his dead rival, Lewis. He is, in fact, the Anti-Lewis.

He has described the Narnia Chronicles as grotesque, disgusting, ugly, poisonous and nauseating. Yet, as Michael Ward, an expert on Lewis, has pointed out, Pullman’s saga begins just as Lewis’s does with a girl hiding in a wardrobe and finding more than she bargained for. It is almost as if he wants to turn Narnia upside-down and then jump on it. While Lewis portrays rationalist atheists as comically ghastly and joyless, Pullman depicts priests as evil and murderous, drunk and probably perverted, and the Church as a conspiracy against happiness and kindness.

Challenged about his assault, Pullman professes enthusiasm for something called the Republic of Heaven, whatever that means. He also says that he draws many of his ideas from Milton’s Paradise Lost. No doubt he does, but much of his thinking could also have been taken from the pages of the Guardian, or from politically correct staff-room conversation in a thousand state schools. Among the good characters in his trilogy are gypsies, an African prince, a homosexual angel and a renegade nun who abandons her faith but who willingly obeys orders from another angel (orientation unknown) who speaks to her through a computer screen.

The bad are to be found among the religious, the respectable and the well-off. A particular villain is discovered at his opulent home. Pullman writes with feeling, ‘Everything Will could see spoke of wealth and power, the sort of informal settled superiority that some upper-class English people still took for granted.’ Pullman has also assailed Lewis for being racist, a charge that simply doesn’t stick. One of Lewis’s noblest characters is the dark-skinned Calormene, Emeth, while the vilest is the White Witch. He also suggests that Lewis is monumentally disparaging of women. As Michael Ward points out, this, too, is absurd:

His other angry charges against Lewis, that he sends Susan Pevensie to hell because she likes lipstick and nylons, and that he kills all the children because he prefers death to life, are equally questionable.

It is a sore pity that Lewis is not here to defend himself and Narnia against this angry foe and his supporters. In his absence, both sets of books will have to speak for their authors. In an age where most stories written for grown-ups are about nothing very much at all, Lewis and Pullman have addressed the great issues of this time and all time, and both deserve to be read by adults. But Pullman would have made better use of his dark materials if he had sought to co-exist with Lewis rather than to attack him. Narnia may have no weapons of mass destruction, but it has a powerful guardian, and I have a suspicion that it will find ways of defending itself.

I am of the Devil’s party

Tuesday 29 January 2002

His children’s trilogy has been described as a celebration of atheism, but Philip Pullman, the winner of this year’s Whitbread Prize, is unconcerned. ‘If there is a God,’ he tells Helena de Bertodano, ‘then he deserves to be put down and rebelled against’

PHILIP PULLMAN, the winner of the Whitbread Prize, is a deeply superstitious man. He nearly had to abandon the book which won him the prize because he could not buy the specific notepad he needed. “I’ve been buying the same paper for years and years: narrow-lined with blue margins, two holes. But one day I bought a pad of paper in Rymans, came home and discovered, to my horror, that it had four holes, not two.”

What would happen if he wrote on a pad with four holes? “How could I?” he cries. “I mean, I put it to you, how could anyone possibly finish a book on four-holes paper? So I went back and said ‘Look, this is dreadful, I want two-holes paper, not four’, and they said they’d stopped making it. So I had to buy a pack of little white stickers and stick them over the extra holes.”

Thus he managed to finish The Amber Spyglass, the third book in a trilogy, His Dark Materials - which started with Northern Lights and continued with The Subtle Knife. And last week The Amber Spyglass made literary history by becoming the first children’s book to win the Whitbread Prize Book of the Year.

Pullman performs the rare feat of appealing to both children and adults alike. “I wanted to reach everyone and the best way I could do that was to write for children,” he explains, “and hope that they’d tell their parents . . . which is what happened.”

J.K. Rowling, of course, has done this with Harry Potter but Pullman is in a different category. Hailed as a literary genius, he has been compared variously to Chekhov, Dickens, Tolkien, Blake and Milton. There are plans to produce a film of the trilogy, and the National Theatre wants to put on a stage version to span three nights.

Pullman is taking his sudden fame in his stride. He has always known that he is a good writer; reviews of his books are fulsome and he has built up a large and dedicated readership without a smidgen of hype (he has sold 1.3 million books in this country alone). Yet, compared with Rowling, he was - until this week - a relative unknown.

We meet at his home on the outskirts of Oxford, a sanctuary of chaos, with piles of books and magazines teetering on almost every square inch of floor space. When I had spoken to him on the phone before meeting him, he had sounded irritated by all the attention. But in person, he is warm, amusing company, talking easily and articulately about his work.

Pullman acknowledges both Blake and Milton as key influences. The title of his trilogy, His Dark Materials, is taken from Paradise Lost, and the story he tells is a reworking of Milton’s epic poem. Will and Lyra, his two child protagonists, are the new Adam and Eve, who are drawn into a quest to depose the creator of Earth and the evil Church and establish a republic of Heaven.

This may sound like heavy stuff, but Pullman sets it in a fabulous fairy-tale landscape populated with armoured bears, witches, spies who travel on the backs of dragonflies and a knife that cuts windows into parallel worlds. The most arresting motif is the “daemon”, the creature that mirrors your soul: it is portrayed, in his books, as a visible bird or animal which accompanies you everywhere.

If Pullman had a daemon, what would it be? “I think she’s probably a magpie or a jackdaw, one of these birds that pick up bright shining things and doesn’t distinguish in terms of shininess between the diamond ring and the KitKat wrapper - just as I don’t distinguish in terms of ‘storyness’ between Shakespeare and Neighbours.”

He is not joking when he mentions Neighbours, the Australian soap, which he watches every day without fail, emerging from the shed where he writes at 1.45pm on the dot. Nothing could seem further from the fantastical worlds he creates than the tawdry “reality” of Neighbours. Pullman disagrees. “I justify it intellectually by saying that in a soap opera like that you can see a lot of ancient or mythical or fairytale story patterns coming up again and again. Who is Lolly’s father? The issue of ‘Does my child really belong to me?’ is an ancient one.”

Pullman insists that his own novels are firmly rooted in the real world. “I know there aren’t really bears that talk, but I’m trying to be as realistic as I can about human beings. The people are as real as I could make them: they are complex and unpredictable, and the fantasy elements are there to say what I thought would be true and interesting about what it’s like to be a human being.

“It comes down to what you’re good at. To my dismay, I’m not good at the sort of story that’s set in everyday life. My imagination only starts to take fire when the talking bears come into it. I’m a little bit ashamed about this. I wish I could do realism.”

Some have called his writing dangerous, a celebration of atheism. The Catholic Herald described His Dark Materials as “the stuff of nightmares”. Some parents warn their children away from it, but there are many more who read it themselves, revelling in the extraordinary inventive reach of the writing. Pullman says cheerfully: “Blake said Milton was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it. I am of the Devil’s party and know it.”

Pullman insists that his writing celebrates values that no one can argue with. “The story celebrates love, courage, an imaginative engagement with the world, tolerance, open-mindedness, courtesy. And it criticises cold-heartedness, fanaticism, cruelty, intolerance. Who could argue with that? Even The Catholic Herald will find something to agree with in there.”

Pullman wouldn’t go so far as to describe himself as an atheist. “Atheism suggests a degree of certainty that I’m not quite willing to accede to. I suppose technically you’d have to put me down as an agnostic. But if there is a God and he is as the Christians describe him, then he deserves to be put down and rebelled against.

“As you look back over the history of the Christian church, it’s a record of terrible infamy and cruelty and persecution and tyranny. How they have the bloody nerve to go on ‘Thought for the Day’ and tell us all to be good when, given the slightest chance, they’d be hanging the rest of us and flogging the homosexuals and persecuting the witches.”

Naturally, he has received some abusive mail. “After the first two books, I used to get letters accusing me of promoting witchcraft or Satanism, so my reply to that was ‘Wait until you’ve read all three books, and if you find that you’ve inadvertently become a Satanist, you can write to the publisher and get your money back’.”

More often, his letters are from readers who have been swept up in his world. He excitedly hurries off to the next room to get me his favourite letter, which arrived a couple of years ago - before he had finished the much-anticipated third volume of his trilogy. It is written in block capitals with a photograph of a squirrel attached to the top:

“Here is a picture of a very cute squirrel. Please admire it. Now that you have admired it, I want you to remember your book, which the world has spent eons waiting for . . . Finish your book or else this squirrel will die. Anonymous. P.S. We are watching you. We know what you are doing. You may not be able to see us, but you know that we are out there. Fear us, Mr Pullman, and pity the poor squirrel.”

Pullman roars with laughter as I read it. He says he met the girl who wrote it at a book-signing in York, when she presented him with a plastic squirrel with a knife implanted in its side. “She was a very nice, very clever girl called Sophie.”

Now 56, Pullman started writing in 1977, while he was working in an Oxford middle school (for pupils aged nine to 13) teaching a wide range of subjects. His imaginative hinterland was formed as a child when, as the son of an RAF pilot, he spent his early years travelling the world. “Never again will any child from this country have experiences like that, to travel by sea across the surface of the earth and to stop at exciting places like Bombay and Port Said and Colombo. To go through the Suez Canal and look at palm trees and camels. It was a rich experience.”

His father was killed when Pullman was seven, but his mother married another RAF pilot and the travelling continued. Eventually the family settled in North Wales, where Pullman attended a comprehensive, becoming the first pupil from the school to win a place at Oxford, where he read English.

Pullman, who is married with two adult sons, abandoned teaching in 1986 and now devotes himself full-time to writing. Like most authors, he finds the act of writing a tortuous process. It is only now, “after 25 years’ apprenticeship”, that he knows he will have something worth reading in the end. “About a third of the way through a book I always have the sense that it’s the worst thing I’ve ever written, the worst thing anyone’s ever written.

“You have to learn the confidence to recognise that feeling of depression and pessimism about the work and just carry on anyway. You get through it and think ‘Hey, it’s not bad’, and then you get a bit further and you think ‘Oh, it’s rather good’.

He says that he himself never knows how a story is going to turn out, and he is as interested as the reader to see what will happen to Lyra and Will. So does he view the writer as a vehicle through which the story writes itself? “Well, that would imply an original voice somewhere else, which would mean I wasn’t inspired but nuts. On the other hand, it does feel as though I’m discovering something that is already there, rather than inventing something that’s not. It’s like a double consciousness.”

I ask if I can see the shed where he writes his books. I had imagined that it was probably a very upmarket shed, more a separate little outhouse with all the mod cons. In fact, the word “shed” is almost too grand for this tiny, dusty hovel. In comparison, his house now seems a model of organisation.

A huge, artificial stuffed rat takes up most of the floor space and the walls are festooned with masks, fading posters and children’s drawings. The whole place is submerged beneath piles of paper, and you get the impression that if you touch anything the whole edifice will collapse. A faded flowery curtain falling off its runners partially obscures the small window. There is a small fan heater on the floor.

“I don’t even clear up the cobwebs in case there’s some ingredient in them which helps me write. I’ve written here for 15 years, and I know that I can come here with my ballpoint pen and my lined paper and sit at my shabby old desk in my filthy little shed amid the dust and the cobwebs. And it works. If I went somewhere else that was bigger and full of space and light, it might not work.”

On his desk one of his narrow-lined notepads is open. In looped handwriting, Pullman has written: ‘So: there is a God, but he is a liar and he’s mortal.’

To Pullman’s bafflement, he is often compared with C.S. Lewis, whose child protagonists also enter parallel worlds. But whereas Lewis is batting for God, Pullman clearly is not. Indeed, he feels venomous about Lewis’s work. “I think Lewis was a remarkable man. But when it came to the Narnia books, I think he was actually dangerous because those books celebrate death. As an end-of-term treat the children are killed: that to me is disgusting.”

Tolkien does not fare much better in Pullman’s estimation. “Lord of the Rings is just not interesting psychologically; there’s nothing about people in it.” Peter Pan is “dreadful rubbish”, but Arthur Ransome, who wrote Swallows and Amazons, is wonderful. “He’s splendid, one of my favourites. The children face problems they have to solve with their own wits and ingenuity, their own consciences and courage.”

Which is, of course, what Pullman’s protagonists are doing. He believes that the most important passage in The Amber Spyglass - indeed, in any of his books - is the conversation that takes place between Lyra and the harpies in the land of the dead. They strike a bargain that if Lyra can tell them the story of her life, they will show her the way out of the land of the dead.

“I discovered as I wrote it that it was something I had always believed and something that many of my books in their different ways were already saying. Every one of us has to have a story: if you go through life without curiosity, it’s a terrible sin.” His choice of words is strange - perhaps deliberately so.

“You have to wake up a bit and see what a beautiful world this is and how lucky we are to be conscious in it . . . That’s why Eve is my great heroine, she wondered what it would be like if she did as the serpent suggested and ate the fruit. Good for her. What a pompous little prig she would have been if she had said, ‘No, I mustn’t’.”

Pullman believes there is no point in wasting your life striving for some mythical Heaven. “I believe in the absolute preciousness of the here and now. Here is where we are and now is where we live.”

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