“There was probably nowhere,” muses Malcolm, the protagonist of Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage , “where anyone could learn so much about the world as this little bend of the river.” However, he soon discovers that there are several other places to learn from as he embarks on an epic voyage of adventure and growing up , all the while protecting a baby, Lyra, from an apocalyptic flood and those out to hurt her. Billed as the “equel” to His Dark Materials trilogy, La Belle Sauvage: The Book Of Dust, Volume One has a story which is as engaging as that of his earlier novels, with characters as vivid. It weaves in folklore, philosophy, physics to sketch a darkening world of intolerance. He spoke to me about daemons, his love of woodwork, and his ideas about childhood and its portrayal in literature.
The Dark Materials trilogy felt like a very complete story arc — what made you want to revisit the story?
In 2005 I wrote a little book called Lyra’s Oxford — the publisher and I were playing with the idea of little bits of paper that got lost, and one of the things I made up was a brochure for a shipping cruise to the eastern Mediterranean and I thought this is rather fun, and put it in the book with no explanation. And one of the things on this paper was destinations for this voyage. Gibraltar, Sicily and then it was going to Smyrna in Turkey and I wrote Café Antalya on it. But I thought there is a story there, I wonder what story that could be? And in the second part of this Book of Dust we go to the Café Antalya in that city and we see something happening. The Book of Dust was really an attempt to provide a framework for that little bit of printed paper.
Often literature portrays children as uni-dimensional but your children are just as complex as adults. Do you see portraying them in this way as part of your responsibility as an author?
I like to write about characters like that and I don’t think children are any less complicated than grown-ups. They just know rather less. So Lyra doesn’t know much about the world but she’s interested in finding out. And the reason why so many children read the first books is that they don’t know much about the world but they trust Lyra to find out for them. So they are willing to follow her.
Your children are very curious. Do you think we lose that quality as we grow up?
I think we do. I think this sense of curiosity, of active interest in the world, is something we really must preserve. We must encourage children; we must give them the opportunities to be curious in education and at home as well, and I think intellectual curiosity is a great virtue.
Do you see nurturing this curiosity as one of your responsibilities?
I hope so but my main purpose is always to tell a story. I love stories and always have done. I couldn’t have written 1,100 pages or so of His Dark Materials if there hadn’t been a story to take me through the seven years it took me to write it. This is a story that begins as a story and will continue as a story but other things are part of it. They are part of it because they are part of my life — I’m interested in science; I’m interested in craftsmanship; I’m interested in geography and all sorts of things. So if I’m interested in them they are going to come out in the book anyway.
How much of you is in the characters, especially Malcolm?
Like Malcolm, I make things out of wood too but when I was young at school... the chisels were blunt, the saws were blunt… but Malcolm was able to learn the trade of carpentry under the supervision of Mr. Taphouse, who did look after his tools. So that is one way in which Malcolm is luckier than me. But I love woodwork. I love the way things work. I love to see how things fit together and can be made to work and work better and I like the physical aspect of it — wood is a wonderful material and the pleasure of dealing with wood after a day’s writing is a wonderful thing because it uses another part of your brain: there is a physical engagement with it.
You seem to believe in people’s ability to learn and grow. Are you an optimist?
I am very optimistic about children. I have been a teacher for 12 years; I’ve taught boys just like Malcolm and girls just like Lyra and they are still there but they have fewer opportunities than they should have. The world has changed so much since I was a boy, and the biggest change has perhaps been the growth of the Internet, mobile phones, video games and all that sort of stuff and they don’t leave much time in the day for doing things like what we used to, such as playing in the woods or going over the hills. We are also now so afraid for children, particularly in big cities. We are afraid of all sorts of things that didn’t seem to loom very large in my childhood. Perhaps people of my age are lucky; we had a luckier time.
This book feels darker than His Dark Materials...
When I was criticising organised religion in the first trilogy, it was looming on the horizon. It had always been there in Western Europe: 500 ago we were burning witches and killing heretics and all that sort of stuff and in other parts of the world that stuff is still going on. Look at what is happening in Mynamar — Buddhists who we thought of as being from a peaceful religion.
As for what’s happening in Europe: Brexit is an absolute disaster. A catastrophe. How any nation can be so stupid passes my belief but then you see we were lied to.
As for Mr. Trump — well — that a great country like America should find itself with a man who can surely cause nothing but shame and humiliation to them — it’s an extraordinary time… over the world.
So in answer to your question: I do think it’s a darker book — but I have faith in Lyra and Malcolm and in Alice and we will see what happens to them.
These are things that are preoccupying me and they are going to come out whether I like it or not — just the way your moral values come out. If you are undertaking a task that is going to take you years, as this is doing — as His Dark Materials did — you are not going to do it in a trivial frame of mind. It’s not a trivial task and you are bound to bring to it all the qualities that you can and those include your moral convictions.
Magic plays an important part in your stories.
I love magic — I don’t believe in it and I believe in it simultaneously. It’s a state of mind which you have to enter to read the alethiometer: simultaneous scepticism and credulity.
Do you think adults lose imagination?
We do sort of lose that but the thing that encourages us to lose it is what William Blake called “single vision”: the dogmatic attitude that I have the truth and everything I know is the truth and you don’t know the truth and you’d better listen to me because I have the truth. And we see that not only in religion but also in politics and science: some writers on science take the view that only rationality can give us the answer and we know what love is: neurons in the brain… an electric current goes there and changes the chemical structure — that’s what love is. No it isn’t! The characteristic sentence that scientists write is X is Y or no more than Y or only Y, and I say X is Y but it is also other things because love is also all the things that poetry says it is about. That is what William Blake would have called two- or threefold vision rather than a single vision, which he condemns. We will see more of that and Lyra will learn about it and so will Malcolm. One thing that is important is Malcolm’s migraine — the “spangled ring.” I have that from time to time. I’ve always been curious about that and science would explain it in a certain way but there is more to it and we are going to find out more about it too.
Daemons are a wonderful concept — particularly the idea of something that helps you develop an understanding of yourself — a lot of children’s literature is about escaping about reality rather than grounding yourself in it. But you do exactly the opposite. Why do you think it is important to do this?
Fantasy is the most wonderful thing for doing that — it fascinates me that more fantasy writers haven’t chosen to do that by looking at psychology. That is what Milton was doing in Paradise Lost : his angels and devils are really just human beings made large and made very clear and plain. The sequence in the Garden of Eden where Satan temps Eve to eat the fruit is the masterpiece in psychology. This wonderful tool exists for exploring human psychology and so few fantasy writers seem to use it. Tolkien doesn’t at all: he just takes humans and Hobbits as being complete. We know all about them, there is nothing more to enquire.
Who are the children’s writers you admire?
I think [Rudyard] Kipling got it right in Kim , which is a masterpiece about the development of a boy. I don’t think A.A. Milne got it right in Winnie-the-Pooh . They are sickly stories with a slightly unhealthy adult longing for childhood. Children don’t want to be children — they want to grow up, they want to be adults.
We can’t pick our daemons but what animal do you think would be yours? And why?
Daemons are an expression of your nature. I think based on the way I live and work she’s probably one of those birds that steals things. A member of the crow family. Because novelists do that, we steal ideas; we steal scenes we see happening through windows, we steal things from other books, from the cinema, from the television, we steal things all the time. I like to think my daemon’s a raven and she’s a scrawny old bird with missing feathers and a sharp beak and a short temper and she’s very cynical but she’s very warm-hearted really.
One of the strengths of the daemon idea, which is probably my best idea ever, is that you can still discover things you can do with it. I am still discovering things and we will discover more about them.
Can you tell us about your writing process, how you come up with your ideas?
The first phase of writing is just walking around with a vague expression or lying on the sofa staring at the ceiling, just thinking about things. And it’s easy to look at me in that state and think he’s idle, just look at him! But that is the very important stage because the story is just assembling itself. Then comes the day when I sit down and I take my pen and then the story is in production and I write a regular amount: three pages every day. About a thousand words. I write by hand with this pen because it works — the same pen. Three pages whether its easy or not — flowing or not — you have to be disciplined.
Which idea came first: Lyra or the Daemon?
Lyra was first: I tried writing the first chapter of His Dark Materials 15 or 16 times but it wouldn’t work because she was on her own. But one day I found myself writing Lyra and her daemon and I thought oh! I didn’t know she had a daemon — let’s write a bit more. It was much better because they could talk to each other — so there was a dynamic element about it at last. So that is where the daemon came from, but when I wrote the first chapter everyone’s daemons changed, adults’ changed as well. Then I wondered what it was doing — it was then just decorative and I realised that children’s daemons changed but stopped changing and that was the moment when I realised I’d got the answer of how to tell the story. By then I knew it was going to be about the difference between innocence and experience, and that made the difference between childhood and adulthood and here I had a way of representing it. It was the most exciting event I’ve ever had as a writer: realising I’d got this big story and the way to tell it.
Do you have the sense readers have wanted to get what you hoped to convey to them?
I think so but then I am not going to tell them off if they get it wrong — because they can’t get it wrong. Reading is intensely, thoroughly democratic. When I am writing I am a despot, a dictator, a totalitarian ruler because I have complete control of life or death, over every comma, every word, every character but when the book is published and it’s the public realm it’s utterly democratic.
