Philip Pullman with Alex O'Connor
Show: Within Reason
Cleaned and reformatted from published transcript or auto-generated captions — punctuation added, filler removed, restructured for readability. Not verbatim. For exact quotes, refer to the original.
Alex O'Connor
C. S. Lewis once wrote — I'm paraphrasing — that a children's book that's only enjoyed by children is a bad book. Do you agree with that?
Philip Pullman
Yes, I do. I disagree with Lewis about a lot of things, but I agree with him when he talks sensibly about books. One other sensible thing he said was about the difference between books that have an atmosphere and books that don't. He referred to Hiawatha — he liked it for the atmosphere of the woods, the Indian names, all the things that come with it — whereas other readers he'd spoken to weren't interested in any of that; they only cared about the plot.
So Lewis is enjoying, and rightly, something I'd now call being in the rose field — I can explain that more later. It's the atmosphere around things, the context of things: what they suggest, what they remind us of, what they're like. That sort of thing. So he's right about that. If only children enjoy a book, it's probably not a very good book — a good one, adults would enjoy too.
Alex O'Connor
Lewis says, 'A waltz that can only be enjoyed while waltzing is a bad waltz.' I think he means it as an analogy, though probably an imperfect one for what we're talking about.
Philip Pullman
Well, there are all sorts of ways of enjoying a waltz — ways of becoming obsessed by one. I've got a tune that goes through my head whenever I'm worried about something, a sort of ersatz Viennese waltz — not a real one, just the most banal series of bars of music, and I can't get rid of the bloody thing. So there are ways of experiencing waltzes that don't involve dancing at all. But is a book the same? I don't think it's a good analogy with books, actually.
He was a good critic, in my view — but a terrible storyteller.
Alex O'Connor
Some people position you — Peter Hitchens has explicitly called His Dark Materials, your most famous trilogy, a conscious response to the Chronicles of Narnia. Do you see yourself as a sort of contra-Lewis writer?
Philip Pullman
Peter Hitchens is a silly ass in many ways. No comment — well, you don't have to put that in.
If it is a conscious response, yes, I'd agree it is to some extent, but it's also many other things as well. It certainly wasn't written entirely to discredit or topple C. S. Lewis off some imaginary throne — not like that at all. I don't like what he does in the Narnia books. I wanted to show an alternative, but that was only one of the things I was doing.
Alex O'Connor
What is it that you don't like about Lewis's Narnia?
Philip Pullman
The way he treats his characters. To have the children go through this extraordinary adventure — all these voyages to different places, all these things they see — and then dispatch them at the end in a railway accident seems to me the most ghastly way out. He couldn't face the responsibility of making them grow up. He didn't want them to be grown up — he wanted them to turn away from things like nylons and invitations, which is a terrible thing to do to a child on the verge of growing up. Children don't want to be sent to heaven. They want to grow up and be men and women. The promptings of sexuality in the teenage body and the teenage mind are important and wonderful and valuable things, and just to dismiss them in that off-hand way is a terrible, terrible thing.
There's another thing, in one of the other books — I can't remember which. There's a boy whose mother is dying, of cancer or something. He goes to this other land — Narnia or somewhere else — and he's told there's a magic apple tree there: if you take an apple and eat it, it cures you of any disease. But he's a good boy, and he's been told that stealing is wrong, so he doesn't take one. He goes home. But then, wonder of wonders, there's a magic apple on his pillow. He gives it to his mother and she's all right.
What a lie. What a filthy lie. I say filthy because there are children reading that book who themselves have a mother dying of cancer, and Lewis is trying to persuade them that their behaviour will make a difference to whether their mother lives or dies. If you're a bad boy, your mother's going to die; if she lives, it's because you were a good boy. It's a filthy lie. I hate it. I despise it.
Alex O'Connor
Lewis seems interested, in a very Christian sense, in innocence — the preservation of childlike innocence. In His Dark Materials you're explicitly writing against this: your characters go through a second kind of Fall, a second Adam and Eve. Without going into too much detail, the maturity and development Lyra goes through is presented as a good thing.
Philip Pullman
It's presented by me as a good thing because it is one. It's a natural thing to grow up. It's a good thing to feel sexual desire. It's a good thing to see the difference between good and evil. These aren't wicked things. They're good things.
Alex O'Connor
Which is quite the opposite for Lewis, who quite explicitly cuts off that adulthood.
Philip Pullman
Yes. Well — I don't blame him only. There was a whole platoon of children's writers in what used to be called the golden age of children's literature. You see it very strongly in A. A. Milne, and in the drawings of Shepard that accompany the Pooh books: little children — aren't they wonderful, aren't they beautiful, aren't they exquisite, aren't they, in a sort of way, desirable?
When Milne was associate editor of Punch, in the early part of the century, through the Great War and into the twenties, he published cartoon after cartoon that were all the same joke: a little child, often in a state of semi-nudity, in the bath or changing on the beach, saying something unbearably cute and charming, and adults looking on fondly — which actually curdles the stomach when you see it now. I've got a bound set of Punch from those years, inherited from my mother, and it wasn't until I looked through it, thinking about children's literature and innocence and experience, that I noticed how strongly this featured. I haven't been able to read Winnie-the-Pooh since without my stomach turning.
Alex O'Connor
What is it that's so stomach-churning about that image of the child saying something cute?
Philip Pullman
Partly the way it's enjoyed, in an almost sensuous way, by the adult — the way it's drawn, the little naked limbs peeping from under the towel. There's something not quite furtive about it, because it's done so unknowingly, probably — but it's there now, and we can see it, and it's pretty ghastly. And this goes for a lot of other books of that period: the idea that children are innocent, and therefore holy, nearer to God than we are — little angels, that sort of stuff. It's so anti-natural. It's so against the whole process of growing up. Children don't want to be like that. What children want, when they're young, is to be grown up.
Alex O'Connor
That's true. Jesus does say you must come to him as little children. And in Genesis, the Fall of Adam and Eve —
Philip Pullman
— is about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They're in a state of innocence, of what Christians would call purity, and then knowledge and morality enter, and that's supposedly the origin of everything bad in the world.
Alex O'Connor
Whereas the inversion you're known for is that this — this stuff entering the world — is what makes life worth living.
Philip Pullman
It's good. It's unequivocally good. Of course we can do bad things — of course we can. But to do bad things without knowing whether they're bad isn't a virtue. It's a defect.
Alex O'Connor
And in your fiction, you associate that liberating stuff — dust, consciousness, awareness, goodness, love — with a corrupt religious authority that wants to banish it, because anything but their truth is treated as bad.
Philip Pullman
That's right.
Alex O'Connor
As well as being associated with a response to Narnia and Lewis and Tolkien, you're also associated with a fairly this-worldly critique of organised religion. I wonder to what extent you'd consider your work anti-organised-religion, or anti the actual doctrines and God-belief, or more of an institutional challenge to something like the Catholic Church.
Philip Pullman
I think I'm against a particular cast of mind that finds a home in organised religion, because it uses religion to control and dominate. We see examples of that in things like the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, in the grotesque powers the Catholic Church still holds in some parts of the world — certainly did in Ireland — and equally in the way the Taliban forbid women to go out without a hijab, or forbid them an education. It's grotesque. It's anti-life. It's just wrong.
Alex O'Connor
You were well known during the period when atheism, and quite fervent critique of religion, became popular with the New Atheists — Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris. Hearing you talk about the filthy lies underlying some religious thinking, people who didn't know much about you might expect you were alongside them, holding the banners, supporting the bus campaign, doing the debates. But you quite intentionally put some distance between yourself and the New Atheists. Why?
Philip Pullman
Because they were just as dogmatic, in their way, as anything on the other side.
Alex O'Connor
The bus campaign said: 'There's probably no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life,' plastered on buses around central London.
Philip Pullman
That was the wrong way round, as far as I could see. There's probably no God — so what are you going to do about it? Rather than saying stop worrying — I don't think anybody worries that there's a God any more. I think we went beyond that a hundred and fifty years ago. It was a silly campaign with a silly slogan. And I dislike the dogmatism — the absolute stony certainty of some of those people. I didn't read the books with much enjoyment. I met Hitchens, I met Dawkins, I didn't meet Harris. I read Daniel Dennett. I just didn't like what they stood for. There seemed to be a lack of proportion in what they said, which is often a sign of a lack of a sense of humour — some of these things are funny; don't get in a rage about them, just laugh.
And there was the profound suspicion they had of the imagination. There's an example in one of Dawkins's books — I forget which — where he says we need a bit of science to keep our imaginations in line. Why do we need to keep our imaginations in line? Are they going to do something evil? Well, yes, says Dawkins — they're going to tell you things that aren't true. But what do you mean by true? Things that aren't scientifically provable? That's a silly way of thinking. It's arguing in a circle. So I was never part of them, and I was quite happy to distance myself.
Alex O'Connor
You wrote a book called The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ — a really interesting device: Mary gives birth to twins, Jesus and Christ, and there's a difference between them throughout their lives, accounting for the different personalities that show up in Jesus and for the development of the mythology around him. There's a critique in it of how the historical story of a man going around doing things became mythologised and institutionalised. Christopher Hitchens reviewed the book and accused you of being a 'Protestant atheist' — by which he meant that when your character rails against the institutionalisation of what should be a personal, historical series of events, it sounded to him like the same critique Protestants make of the Catholic Church.
Philip Pullman
I don't think that's right. I have Jesus say, towards the end of the story, his vision of what a church might be. He compares it to a tree that offers food for the birds, shade for the weary traveller, and finally offers up its good wood for the carpenter. That's what the church should be — it shouldn't say to anyone, 'No, go away, you're not welcome here.' That was the image in the mind of my Jesus.
What I tried to do with the character Christ was to make him the carrier — if I can put it like that — of the virus of dogma. It occurred to me, when I was writing it, to read through the epistles of Paul — the ones he actually wrote himself — and count how many times he refers to Jesus, and how many times to Christ. Jesus turns up maybe thirty times; Christ turns up over a hundred. So that was the aspect of this double figure that Paul appealed to — and which he basically set in stone as the nature of what the church should be. The church has followed Paul ever since. It should really be a Pauline church rather than a Christian one.
Another thing that occurred to me was how fortunate Christians have been in their iconography. A man nailed to a cross is a wonderful image, if nothing else — instantly recognisable, instantly understandable, recreatable in any number of artistic ways. But suppose Jesus had been born not in Bethlehem but in, say, Tarsus, where Paul was born. Paul, as a Roman citizen, was beheaded rather than crucified when he was put to death. If Jesus had been a Roman citizen like Paul, he wouldn't have been crucified — there'd have been no image except a man having his head cut off. What would the Christian icon be then? A severed head gushing blood. It would be horrible, and it wouldn't work nearly so well. Christians were very lucky that Jesus wasn't a Roman citizen — otherwise they'd have had a very difficult icon to work with.
Alex O'Connor
That's probably why they'd say God chooses to manifest in that way — to give one of the most powerful images in history. But alongside the canonical tradition, the gospels, the authentic Pauline letters, it felt to me like your book borrowed from certain apocryphal, Gnostic themes — in particular the idea of Jesus having a twin. The Greek term Didymus is used in the canonical gospels, but it's also used throughout the Gnostic gospels to imply that Jesus had a literal brother who looked just like him.
Philip Pullman
Oh yes, I was fascinated by a lot of the Gnostic material. M. R. James had something interesting to say about this — the great writer of ghost stories was also, of course, a New Testament scholar. He said people claim it's only chance that we ended up with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, that any of the other gospels would have done just as well — but you only have to look at them to see that's not true. Meaning, they're not very good. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are extraordinary storytellers, and they have an extraordinary story to tell.
But there are odd little things that snagged at me as a storyteller. How did this happen — how do we know what Jesus said to Satan in the wilderness? We've only got Jesus's word for it, and he's hardly going to have gone back and said, 'You know what happened — that bastard Satan came along and tried to tempt me, but I didn't give in.' So how are we supposed to understand that the gospel writers knew that story? Who could they have got it from except Jesus? Another episode that can only have happened out of the hearing of witnesses is what happened in the Garden of Gethsemane — who was there to hear Jesus say, 'Take this cup from me'? So there are things I'd want to question any witness about.
Alex O'Connor
Some people call the story of Jesus the greatest story ever told, to the point that stories rooted in it — like Narnia — are said to work so well because they draw on that tried-and-tested story. Do you agree with that assessment?
Philip Pullman
No. It's a good story, but in whose hands is it being told? John's story is very different from Mark's, and Mark's is pretty sparse and clear compared with Luke's. Frank Cottrell Boyce, who was trying to convert me to Christianity, once said to me: doesn't it prove the story's true, that — like a law case — you hear lots of different versions from different sides? And I said, well, so what? Why does that prove any one of them is true, or that they're all true, when they don't agree with one another? It just makes it like an ordinary story. Like an ordinary law case.
It's a good story. But I can think of a way of making it better. If Judas had come to Jesus not to kiss him and betray him to the Romans, but so that his kiss could transport him away from Jerusalem to safety — to a city several hundred miles away, Athens or Rome or Cairo or Baghdad, where he'd be safe from crucifixion — that's a better story, because then we want to know what happened next. What did he do there? Did he write anything? Surely a wonderful storyteller like that — somebody would have written down what he said. There'd be more story to tell. Just to kill him like that saves the difficulty of working out what he would have said next.
And it doesn't make moral sense. It's based on the old idea of redeeming a sin by paying the debt it incurs — you've stolen some money from your employer, so I pay the employer back, and that redeems it, and you're free of sin. That's nonsense. It's absolute nonsense to say that people who had yet to be born, hundreds of years later, would be infinitely sinful, but aren't any more, because this man was killed in Jerusalem in that year. It doesn't make any moral sense at all. I've never understood it. No Christian has ever managed to explain to me why it's a just way of carrying on.
Alex O'Connor
Two things on that. First: you said killing him off like that is too easy. We're so used to the crucifixion story — and to a resurrection scene like the one in Narnia — that it can feel obvious. But Christians would say the story is written at a time when the Jews expected the Messiah to be a magnificent warlord, and the philosophical culture believed God was eternal, untouchable, transcendent brilliance. In the face of both of those, God descends into Roman brutality — and to be killed in that context wouldn't have read as an easy plot line. It would have been shocking, scandalous, a remarkable reversal of expectations about both the nature of God and the nature of the Messiah. So would 'too easy' have been true at the time?
Philip Pullman
Well, what's too easy is killing him off and, two days later, having him pop up to life again. The beheading version wouldn't work so well if he turned up carrying his head under his arm.
Alex O'Connor
I've often thought — I get why the resurrection matters, but even granting it, if the punishment for sin is death, and Jesus dies and comes back to life, that's one thing. But if Jesus actually descended into hell and was, say, eternally punished in hellfire on our behalf, that would be a hell of a sacrifice, literally, and the opening to a very good story: do we rescue him? How do we get him out?
Philip Pullman
You're on to something there — a bestseller for you.
Alex O'Connor
I've always struggled with this. If the punishment for sin is meant to be an eternity in hell, then for Jesus to pay that price, mustn't he suffer an eternity in hell? Crucifixion is brutal, I'm sure, and I don't know what death is like, but coming back three days later — not a bad outcome, to save the sins of mankind. It feels unbalanced: the Christian message is supposed to be about him taking on something more.
Alex O'Connor
Christopher Hitchens once said — he never wrote fiction himself, despite being celebrated as a writer of non-fiction — that all the friends he had who were good at writing fiction were also musical. He said he had no musical bone in his body. I think his favourite song was 'Higher Love,' which they played at his funeral — you'd expect him to name some classical concerto to sound impressive, but I'm fairly sure it was that. He talked about friends like Martin Amis as having a bit of music in them. You've written and composed music yourself, even if you've never put anything out into the world. Do you think there's anything to that connection?
Philip Pullman
I've often thought about the similarities and differences between music and fiction. There are things music can do that prose can't — counterpoint, for instance. We can hear and understand even a little simple round like Frère Jacques, sung around the classroom. You can't do that in prose, because you've only got one line. The closest analogy is a sonata for solo violin, which can hint at counterpoint by playing on two strings at once — hinting at other tunes behind the tune you're playing — but it's very difficult. That's what prose is like: you can't easily weave in other things going on at the same time.
Unless you're writing a comic. In a comic, or a graphic novel, you can have several things going on at once — the picture showing an action, the words the characters say to each other in a speech balloon, and a caption that might say '10 years later' or 'meanwhile, behind the woodshed.' You can get a kind of counterpoint. And of course you can do that with film, too — a great director will have several things going on at once, which makes watching the film again even more rewarding. But it's very hard to do in pure prose.
Alex O'Connor
Did Hitchens give any other examples of people who made fiction and were musical?
Philip Pullman
Not that I remember. I don't know that Martin Amis had any musical association — I never met him, never heard he played the piano.
Alex O'Connor
I think it was more an anecdote about a kind of creativity. Amis apparently said something about needing to be a bit stupid to be a novelist — maybe being kind about his very intelligent friend — gesturing at a kind of naivety, an ability to step outside hyper-rationality.
Philip Pullman
I'm very interested when I find people who aren't musical. A few weeks ago on Desert Island Discs, Salman Rushdie was the castaway, and every single one of his eight records was a pop song from the seventies — not a hint of jazz, classical, or folk. I was astounded.
I don't play the piano, to my great regret — nobody ever says 'I wish I'd never learned the piano,' do they? We were always moving about, so we never had one. Instead I had the portable instrument, the guitar. This was the early sixties, so naturally I wanted to be Bob Dylan, and I learned all the chords — that isn't really being musical, but it gave me another view into music: what chords mean, how harmony changes, how different singers and composers use that. I love it for its own sake, and I had a very varied choice when I went on Desert Island Discs myself. I've always been interested in how it compares with prose, and with poetry too.
Alex O'Connor
People talk about the connection between poetry and music.
Philip Pullman
There once was a very close connection — a lot of poetry was sung. It's interesting to look at twentieth-century songs and ask why the ones that have survived, that have become classics, are good. Often it's the words, put together in a particularly singable way, without consonants that clutter each other up.
Alex O'Connor
I'm a great believer in that. When you're writing music and humming a melody, certain words just seem to fit — they feel phonetically right. My least favourite thing when listening to a song is when someone stresses the wrong syllable to make it work — singing 'forEVer' instead of 'FORever' just because it fits the tune.
Philip Pullman
That's bad writing. That's bad composition. It's never worth it. You might think, but that word is so good there — if it doesn't work phonetically, you have to get rid of it. There's something very physical about it.
Alex O'Connor
Which is why, with poetry, you're a believer in reading at least certain kinds out loud — because otherwise you miss the physicality.
Philip Pullman
Yes. Not because it's supposed to be like that, but because it works better like that — because it works at its best. That's the only way you can really experience it, by getting it in your mouth, getting your tongue and your teeth and your lips involved.
Alex O'Connor
When you're writing, do you speak aloud — hear how phrases sound?
Philip Pullman
Oh, all the time. I can't write with music playing — I don't understand writers who do. Any other noise is fine: traffic, children playing, dogs barking, pneumatic drills — bring them on. But the slightest hint of a tune and I can't hear what I'm writing.
Alex O'Connor
Because it disrupts the rhythm?
Philip Pullman
Very much a rhythmic thing. I'm conscious of the rhythm of the words I write, because prose has a rhythm, and I like to know the rhythm of the next sentence before I find the words for it.
Alex O'Connor
Much like songwriting — it's got to go dum-dum-dum-dum. You can't just put anything you like in there.
Philip Pullman
It's got to fit. It's got to work. I am very conscious of that.
Alex O'Connor
What you said about comics is interesting — that certain things can't be translated between media. His Dark Materials has been adapted, first as a film, then as a television series. I suppose the main thing you lose converting a book to film is length — you don't have time to tell the whole story. But going the other way, film can do things prose can't: overlapping dialogue, showing a location while you hear the dialogue. There's a lot film can do that books can't. And yet books are often considered the more elevated, more foundational way of telling a story.
Philip Pullman
That view is held by people who haven't understood the power and the majesty of comic books. I'd like to write about this properly one day — there are interesting things to say about how comics are told, the fluency of the medium. But books can do something films can't. Take a sentence — I'll get it nearly right — from Middlemarch: Dorothea seldom visited the town, but she did occasionally go out on little errands of charity. You can show her going out in her dog cart, but you can't show her doing it occasionally. That takes prose. Each of these media has different strengths, different things it can and can't do.
Alex O'Connor
My next question was going to be what books can do that films can't. They can take their time — though the closest film gets is a voiceover, or putting '10 years later' on the screen, a bit like the comic-book caption. There's no real way around it otherwise.
Philip Pullman
That betrays an insincerity of purpose. If you're working in a medium, go for its strengths — don't do something it's not suited to. Film isn't suited to having someone read a story over the top of it. So don't do it. Find another way.
Alex O'Connor
Were you fearful or suspicious, on the occasions people approached you to adapt your books?
Philip Pullman
No — my usual question is, how much? And if I get a satisfactory answer, they're welcome to it. But more seriously: yes, I was always interested. And you're right about length. Until long-form television — a series of six-hour episodes — came along, length was the difficulty. You couldn't get a whole novel into a film. Short stories make better films than novels do, for that reason.
But that's not the only thing film can do. With pictures on a screen you can show things immediately — take in a whole scene in a second. Show them the view from Primrose Hill looking down at London: there it is. That takes longer to do in prose. On the other hand, when you write, you enlist the reader's imagination too — which is why the most common thing people say after seeing a film of a book they knew well is, 'But he shouldn't look like that, and she'd never say that.' It seldom works. It's probably true that crappy books make better films than good books.
Alex O'Connor
Maybe because a crappy book is sometimes a good story constrained by the wrong medium — better told elsewhere.
Philip Pullman
Or a story that's just fallen into the wrong hands.
Alex O'Connor
You've said before that the great thing about a film or television adaptation is there's no law saying that once it's made, the books have to be destroyed — they're still there, you can still read them. So even if you care about a story you've put a lot into, and somebody takes it and makes a bad adaptation of it, in a way — so what?
Philip Pullman
Well, what you can say is: can I see my bank account, please? They bought it from you — they bought the right to change it. If you didn't want them to, you shouldn't have sold it. You can hang around the producer, nag the director, sit in on all the shooting, make yourself a nuisance — you'll get nowhere. You'll only get a headache, and you'll annoy everyone, and nothing will change.
Alex O'Connor
Of course, some people will only watch the television show and feel they needn't bother with the books — they'll have heard the story, and they'll associate the way it's told on screen with you. Does that bother you?
Philip Pullman
It's a fact of the way things work. It's like this actor in that part — can we get Alec Guinness's face away from our idea of George Smiley? It doesn't matter very much.
Alex O'Connor
For a lot of people that would be Ben Kenobi — which would upset Guinness a great deal, since he didn't much like playing in that silly little Star Wars film.
Philip Pullman
No, but he had a very good agent, and he got a percentage of the royalties.
Alex O'Connor
I want to take a bit of a hard pivot here — we've talked about literature, we've talked about religion, but one thing I'm really interested in, and have been of late, is consciousness. I get the impression you have been too — not least because of the themes running through your books, but also because of the context in which I hear your name come up. I speak to someone like Philip Goff about analytical philosophy, consciousness, the foundations of reality, and he'll mention your name and talk about The Book of Dust.
Philip Pullman
The Book of Dust — I've just finished it. I found myself exploring, in that book, things that had caught my attention on the way through the story from the very beginning: consciousness and imagination, in particular — what they are, how they work, what they aren't. Goff came into my reading at a good point, because I was just ready to become alert to this panpsychist idea — that everything is actually conscious — which seems to me about the most reasonable and sensible thing I've ever heard a philosopher say.
How can matter be conscious? Well, I'm made of matter — wherever you slice me, I'm made of matter, there's nothing else in there, no little wisps of spirit. I'm entirely material, and yet I'm conscious. Therefore matter can be conscious. Whether this glass can be conscious, I'm not so sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if it retained some distant memory of having been raised to the lips of the ex-president in that portrait over there. I know my fingers are conscious, because when I'm doing something that doesn't require my attention to be precisely on them — typing, or woodworking — my hand knows what to do, it picks up a plane. Is it my hand or my brain that's conscious there? No — it's my hand. I can feel it. That's where the consciousness is.
This grew, in the course of writing, into what Lyra came to call the rose field. Everything we think of as the world — everything we can see and feel and hear — is surrounded by a nimbus of associations, possibilities, memories, resemblances. It's a sort of invisible field, like a gravitational field, but one that doesn't vary with distance — like the Higgs field, which permeates the entire universe. I'm not sure about the rose field, because it partly depends on us — it's partly created by us. Every time I see a lorry filled with vegetables, I think of Covent Garden; that's my association with it, and there it is, somewhere in the rose field. That's what the rose field is. And we don't perceive it by sitting in a chair and making it up — we perceive it with our imagination. Imagination, as William Blake and others have asserted, is a sense of perception. It's not making things up. It's seeing what's there.
I've been reading a lot of Coleridge recently — in the Biographia Literaria and elsewhere he talks about his conception of primary and secondary imagination, and fancy, which is a lower kind of thing altogether. I find it fascinating, and I'm writing out for myself a sort of non-fiction paper on what it is that Lyra means when she talks about the rose field, and what she discovers by looking at it, and what dust is.
Alex O'Connor
The first time dust is mentioned in the whole saga is in chapter two or so, where one of the scholars — in a room rather like this one — is watching Lord Asriel show his lantern slides.
Philip Pullman
Yes — that beam of light, and he says, it's dust. Not light, but dust. Is it coming up, or coming down, or going up? That's the big question. Is dust going out from us, or coming to us? That's what Lyra discovers — it's a bit of both. That is, in fact, what our imagination is. That's how we contribute to the rose field, how we build it up.
Alex O'Connor
In that moment, looking at the slide, there's a child next to Lord Asriel who isn't attracting dust in the same way — given that dust is associated here with consciousness. A lot of people would say children are still developing, but they're clearly conscious, they have interiority, they have thoughts. What was the motivation for making dust explicitly an adult thing?
Philip Pullman
Because it's knowledge as well as awareness — conscious knowledge, conscious awareness. It's thinking about itself. It's self-reflective knowledge, and children don't think about themselves that way, not the way adults do. There are a lot of contradictions and mysteries in the books, things I didn't get quite right, things I could have gone back and fiddled with — but that's the case with every book.
Alex O'Connor
Do you feel you have the right to do that — if you decided, say, that chapter fourteen of your first book wasn't quite right, would you have the right to change it now?
Philip Pullman
The right, yes — but not the very good sense to do it. You annoy publishers, you annoy readers who have to buy another copy of the damn thing, to no great purpose.
Alex O'Connor
It's interesting that with non-fiction you get updated editions — fortieth-anniversary, expanded and updated. I wonder if novelists should sometimes do the same, especially with a book so sensitive to present scientific understanding. I remember you saying you were praying scientists wouldn't work out what dark energy actually was until you'd finished the book.
Philip Pullman
They still haven't.
Alex O'Connor
Maybe one day dark energy and dark matter will be officially associated with consciousness, and your book will move from the fiction shelf to the non-fiction shelf.
Philip Pullman
Quite, quite. But think what it would mean to actually rewrite a finished story. If Dickens had decided to go back and kill Oliver Twist halfway through, or resurrect someone who died — or if Shakespeare had added a little extra scene at the end of Hamlet: oh no, Hamlet's only wounded, it's all right, we can save him —
Alex O'Connor
People do something like this without editing the original text. When there's a nice, complete story or sequence of films, and a studio wants to make more money, they resurrect a character not by editing the original but by having them come back from the dead in a later instalment. That doesn't just make for a bad film later — it retroactively spoils the first one too.
Philip Pullman
Do you think so? I don't think it need ruin the first bit. You can read the criticisms, you can read the critics, you know what the film's about, you can choose not to see it — or you can say, that's all right, but it's not as good as the original. It's kind of accepted now that films themselves have a rose field around them — all the possible films you could make with the characters, stories that haven't been told yet.
Philip Pullman
It's a strange world, the world of film — strange because it affects the emotions of the people who make films. They're very excitable, very passionate — partly, possibly, because there's so much money involved. Fantastic amounts of money on barely credible things. I heard about a prop man on a film I wasn't involved in, but someone I know was — he'd been told to find a boat, a big fishing boat, and couldn't find one anywhere in America, so he went to Germany, where they have plenty of fishing boats, found one he liked, bought it, and had FedEx bring it to America. We were going to see it for four or five seconds on screen. That's all. But they don't hesitate spending money like that — because there's so much money involved, it distorts their sense of reality a bit.
Alex O'Connor
It's strange, isn't it — you might think it's because it's a visual medium and you want people immersed, but then think about theatre: puppeteers, cardboard backgrounds nobody minds, and you can still be immersed in the story.
Philip Pullman
You do that in the theatre because that's how you behave — we know we have to pretend, we're gathered there to pretend. We don't mind that the wall wobbles a bit when the door closes, that it's not really tea in the teapot, because we've all gathered there to pretend. But we don't go to a cinema to pretend. We don't have the same relationship with it.
That's another interesting thing — the difference between film and theatre. A film is much more like a novel than a stage play can be, because on stage there are no close-ups. Film is told in lots of close-ups. And so are novels.
Alex O'Connor
Where to put the characters, and where to put the camera.
Philip Pullman
That's David Mamet's two questions — and they apply to novels too. Where do you put the camera is the most important question of all: where am I seeing this from, who is seeing this? I tell people writing a book to ask themselves where the light is coming from in a scene — are the curtains open, is it a dark night outside or blazing sunshine, or is there a fire in the hearth with just one little sidelight? What light are we seeing the characters by? It's a film question, really, but it helps a great deal when you're writing a scene in a novel too.
Alex O'Connor
You've written from the perspective of the so-called omniscient narrator — as opposed to the reliable or unreliable narrator, first person or third. The idea of an omniscient narrator who just knows everything has sometimes been critiqued.
Philip Pullman
Yes — he was a suspicious character. With modernism came a great suspicion of the omniscient narrative voice: who is he? He's privileged, because we think of him as a he. Where does he come from, where is he standing? People began to mistrust this voice that comes from nowhere, and only trusted books with a clearly named, described narrator, usually one of the cast of characters.
I've always loved the omniscient narrator — it's a huge privilege to tell a story from that position. You can dart about like a dragonfly, and novelists have done that. Think of the chapter in Vanity Fair that describes the Battle of Waterloo — Thackeray has a little character called Ensign Stubble, who's in the battle, frightened, thinking back to his grandfather's farm and the apple trees he grew up with, and then, many years later, when he's an old man, he would say such-and-such. So along the stream of time, this dragonfly-like attention of the omniscient narrator darts backwards and forwards. It's a wonderful thing to see, a wonderful thing to do — but less and less done now, because of that suspicion.
Alex O'Connor
Sometimes religious people think of everything as existing in the mind of God — one great mind, and we're all living inside it, and it's in control, but there's also a kind of freedom we have even though we exist inside it. I'm thinking of Lyra's Oxford and Jordan College, all of which exists, or was created, in your mind, and yet these characters seem to have lives of their own inside it.
Philip Pullman
They're in the rose field. That's what I mean by the rose field — it's where impalpable things are, the world of ghosts and phantoms and shadows and mysteries and metaphors. Lyra's world is part of the rose world, as Oxford is part of the rose world.
Alex O'Connor
Do you imagine yourself as being part of that world, or the creator of it, in a narrative sense? When you're writing, or when you go back and read, do you picture yourself sitting in the hall watching Lyra run up to the president's back room — or picturing yourself in a godlike fashion, being everywhere at once, aware that something else is going on beyond the city gates even while Lyra runs through the hall?
Philip Pullman
Yes — but I'm not like God. I'm like a film director, who is close to Lyra with one camera following her as she gets up there, but also knows what's going on in the kitchen, because there's another film unit in there filming those bits, which the editor and director will later cut together. I'm directing a film. I'm not like God. I'm like Orson Welles.
The twentieth century is full of novels that are like films, because film was there — novelists saw films. Graham Greene is a good example; he was a film critic for a while.
I think we all do this now, whether intentionally or not. If we're writing a scene, we imagine it as a film — they come in, they speak, we see them closely. He passes a note under the table to his neighbour: we see that in close-up, because we tell the reader about it. In a film, the camera would be down there watching it — one of the things you can't do on the stage. There's a lovely cartoon in those early editions of Punch showing the influence of film on the stage: an actor and actress poised to kiss, and behind them a long queue of people forming from the stalls, going up through a magnifying glass and away again — a close-up, illustrated on stage. You can't really do that in the theatre, but the cartoon captures it.
We can't unthink the cinema. We can't think our way back to a time before that way of telling stories existed. Dickens died before the cinema existed, but a lot of his later books are written as if for a cinema that didn't exist yet — like the opening of Bleak House: a perfect film panorama, London, Lincoln's Inn, mud, fog gathering in the streets, pinching the fingers of the little cabin boy on deck, settling in the bowl of the skipper's pipe — all these close-ups within a great panorama of London. And later, in Our Mutual Friend, there's a dinner party where he scans all the way around the guests, showing them in action and talking, just as a film director would.
Dickens was an extraordinary genius. He said somewhere that every writer of fiction, whether or not he consciously writes for the stage, is in effect writing for the stage. He was both right and wrong there — yes, we write in a dramatic way, but he was writing for a medium he didn't know anything about, which was film. Thackeray, too — at the end of one of the chapters in Vanity Fair he says something like, our dolls have had their play, let's fold them up and put them back in the box, and we'll pick them up another time. A lot of writers of that period were thinking in terms of a dramatic presentation of their work, but the medium didn't exist yet.
Alex O'Connor
Dickens would have been aware, writing for the stage, that you can zoom in and stand next to a character and look at their eye in detail — film seems like a natural extension of that. I think there are things film can overcome, though — as well as the visuals, there's the dialogue. Monologues are extremely rare in film, because in theatre they're a device for hearing a character's inner thoughts — you know a character probably wouldn't really say this out loud, but the audience is there to pretend, so it works. In film it feels a bit wrong. In a book, of course, you can do whatever you like.
Philip Pullman
Films took a little while to become aware of everything they could do. I think it was one of Hitchcock's early talkies, about people stuck in a lifeboat, and there was music on the soundtrack, and the producer said, where the hell is the orchestra? I can't see an orchestra, they're in a lifeboat. And Hitchcock said, where's the camera?
Alex O'Connor
I'd never considered that — that when music first appears in a film, it's an extremely strange thing to do. You're watching a scene on a lake, and suddenly there's a bunch of violins. Now we don't even notice — in fact, it's more conspicuous when music isn't there.
Philip Pullman
We notice things when they're not right — badly placed, too loud. If you had a sudden burst of hip-hop in a film about Robin Hood, we'd think that was odd. We notice when things don't work.
Alex O'Connor
There's a trend now of people watching films and television with the subtitles on — not just people hard of hearing, but young people generally, because the characters mumble. I think it's because when films were first a thing, microphones weren't good, so actors had to project as if doing theatre. Once microphones got good enough that you could whisper right into one, actors had the freedom to give a more realistic performance — but it became harder to understand what they were saying.
Philip Pullman
I get the subtitles thing — I have hearing aids, I need them. The same thing is true, in a different way, of the difference between operatic singing and showbiz singing. Operatic singers, for hundreds of years, had no microphones — they had to compete with, overcome, the orchestral sound, which led to a style of singing that favours the vowels over the consonants; you can barely tell what language it is, but it's a voice making a sound. As soon as electric microphones were invented, in the twenties I suppose, you got the heyday of the crooner — Bing Crosby, 'Blue Moon' — you could sing quietly and still be heard at the back of the auditorium, or on a film.
Alex O'Connor
Frank Sinatra said, I think — unless I've made this up — that his instrument was the microphone.
Philip Pullman
And Frank Sinatra doesn't exist without the electric microphone. That's exactly right. Which is why, when the Proms have a showbiz night with operatic singers doing songs from Carousel or Oklahoma!, it all sounds wrong — they're singing in the wrong tradition.
Alex O'Connor
We treat a microphone, in this context, as though its job is just to pick up sound so people can hear it — it's not supposed to actually do anything. If we were talking now on a stage in a large theatre, we'd be speaking very differently. We don't think of the microphone as doing anything beyond letting people hear us, but it's as much an instrument as the strings on a violin. I saw David Tennant play Macbeth in London a year or two ago — they told everyone to put headphones on, the cast were all wired with microphones, and the point wasn't just sound effects, but that the characters could whisper. In the most intense moments, he pulls Lady Macbeth close and whispers to her in quiet desperation — something you couldn't do in ordinary theatre and have the audience hear.
Philip Pullman
No — but you'd fake it. A skilful actor would have been trained to speak very quietly in a way that was perfectly clear. That's one reason people like subtitles now — actors don't have that training any more.
Alex O'Connor
There was a bit of me, sitting down and putting on headphones, that wondered if this was a gimmick — but the genuine whisper really worked, and I don't think it could have been replicated without it. I think that's the kind of thing this sort of amplified theatre can do that novels can't: you can tell someone a character is whispering, but hearing a whisper does something to your brain chemistry — you're evolutionarily wired to think you're being told something secret, you lean in, your ear turns to the side. Writing that someone whispered doesn't have the same effect. Do you have thoughts on how to recreate that physical leaning-in of the listener in a novel?
Philip Pullman
I would make it physical — her hair tickling his cheek, the smell of her shampoo, whatever it is. You introduce other senses to give the feeling of closeness, and quiet. You can do that.
Alex O'Connor
Going back to consciousness and religion, and the themes running through your books — to what extent do you see philosophy, or religious ideas, as good inspiration for a story, versus something you hope your stories inspire people to go and learn about? With these themes of consciousness, do you hope someone might read the book, find it interesting, and go off and read some philosophy of consciousness — or is it, for you, just an interesting plot device?
Philip Pullman
I suppose both, really. I'd like people who read about Lyra's search for dust to think about it themselves — maybe go and read Philip Goff, and other people on consciousness, and think about what it means and how it works. I'd like that. But that's not my purpose in writing the story.
My purpose, well — it's never pure, never simple. One purpose was to make some money, because I'm a professional writer; I don't want to spend my time not earning money when I could be. Another purpose is to tell a story as clearly as I possibly can. I am the servant of the story — I think I wrote about this in my introduction to Grimm Tales, or somewhere. I am the servant of the story, and I must do what good servants do: come to work on time, not come to work drunk, do all the research necessary so that my writing hand has all the facts it needs. I must serve the story. That's my purpose in doing it.
Another purpose might be to gain the good opinion of people I admire — if so-and-so gives me a nice review, I can pat myself on the back for that. There are all sorts of other perfectly good reasons for wanting to write a book, and persuading people of one's worldview might be one of them.
Alex O'Connor
Some people swear by writing a bit intoxicated — write drunk, edit sober. You said you mustn't show up to work drunk. Do you have thoughts on that kind of stream-of-consciousness-inducing state?
Philip Pullman
I don't need it very often. But if I do — if I've been working all day and nothing's appeared, and I'm feeling dreadful and wretched — one thing is to fill a proper glass with gin and drink it quite quickly. That works. Another trick — and it is a trick — is to write a lot of dialogue. 'Hi.' 'Oh, hello, haven't seen you for a long time.' 'No, where have you been?' 'Oh, here and there. How are you getting on?' That's half a page already, and all that's happened is waffling. But if you go by pages, as I do — three pages counts as a day's work — and you're at the end of the day, tired, fed up, with a headache, and you've written nothing, lots of dialogue fills the page with hardly any trouble at all.
Alex O'Connor
Is that a target — three pages a day?
Philip Pullman
It used to be. I say used to, because for years, all my life, I wrote by hand — three A4 pages, narrow-lined — and I'd finish the sentence at the bottom of the last page, so I'd already got the next page conquered, and then I'd stop. That was a day's work.
Alex O'Connor
Why write by hand?
Philip Pullman
I preferred it. I liked the feeling of forming letters gracefully, and I liked the look of my writing — I had a rather graceful italic hand, which I taught myself, because I wanted to write gracefully, and because the way you form the letters in italic is a very energy-saving way of writing: it gives the quickest, most economical link from one letter to another, and it's also the most legible. I like the feel of writing with a ballpoint pen — I don't use a fountain pen, because they go dry if you don't write for a minute or so, and then you have to decide whether it's a long pause or a short one, and take the cap off to let it dry, which is fiddly and annoying. A ballpoint never goes dry.
But then COVID came along, and one of the things it did to me, among many other things, was give me arthritis in my joints — as part of the trouble I already had with my hip, my thumb joints became very painful, and I couldn't hold a pen. So I turned to the keyboard instead.
Alex O'Connor
So before that, everything was written by hand — did you turn up to the publisher old-fashioned style, with a wad of paper in an envelope?
Philip Pullman
No, no — it always went through a typing stage first.
Alex O'Connor
Did you type it out yourself afterwards?
Philip Pullman
Yes, usually. There was one book I didn't, because I was in a hurry to finish it, so my wife typed it for me using a voice-directed program — she'd read a passage and it would type it out. It only failed once: there was a passage about some trees, and it suddenly typed 'ruff ruff.' I said, what's this? She said, oh, I remember — the dog barked. And it spelled that out too, as dialogue.
There's definitely something about technology that changes the way writing is done. But by the time COVID came along I was already in my seventies, and I'd been writing all my life — it didn't really make much difference, typing instead of writing by hand. It might have done once, but my style was too established; I was too used to putting words together.
Alex O'Connor
There are a couple of things technology does, I think. My friend Sheen Quirk was talking to David Perell about the influence of the backspace key — before you could just hit backspace, there was a kind of commitment that came with writing a sentence. You had to think about it first: the rhythm, the rhyme, how it was going to sound, before putting it down on paper. You can't just type and half-forget you're typing, and go, oh no, I'll go back and change that — it wasn't as easy. Now it's the work of a moment to swipe your mouse over it and change it.
Philip Pullman
And that must affect the way people write.
Alex O'Connor
It must — though I think it affects people who are beginning to write more than people who've been writing for sixty years already. Sheen also made the point that there's a kind of corrective element to technology now: if you put a Shakespearean sonnet into Microsoft Word, you'd get red lines telling you something's wrong, and it would probably suggest improvements.
Philip Pullman
I'm sure AI would now.
Alex O'Connor
I saw a photo once of some AI writing tool — somebody had quoted Descartes, 'I think, therefore I am,' and the tool suggested, 'try just saying therefore I am' — more confident, it said, because it was trying to cut the 'I think.'
Philip Pullman
That's a very good example of why AI will never supersede the brain.
Alex O'Connor
You think never?
Philip Pullman
Never — because AI has no concept of what I call the rose field, the contexts that surround things. Everything is a first-ever thing to it, except that of course it's got to imitate something that's already been written, over five million pages, by somebody else. It's a toy. It's a trick. It's a dead end.
Alex O'Connor
I'm not convinced. There are a lot of quite grandiose fears about artificial intelligence destroying the world, but certainly the creative industries are concerned.
Philip Pullman
Well, one of the reasons they're concerned is that it's much cheaper to pay an AI to write your novel, or your song, or your score, than to pay a human being — and they haven't organised themselves into unions yet, so they're still cheaper.
Alex O'Connor
I have no doubt that maybe now, and certainly within the next ten years, an AI could write a novel that I could read and think was written by a brilliant human author — maybe because I'm a bad reader and a bad writer, but it seems clear to me that it would be the case. There are meta-level considerations that change how you interact with a text — I sometimes think of John Berger, in Ways of Seeing, showing a painting and saying, just look at this, see what you think — then turning the page to reveal it's labelled 'the last painting Van Gogh did before he killed himself.' How does that change how you interact with the art? On one level it shouldn't, because it's the same image, but context matters. I think there'll always be a sense in which knowing something is written by an AI, rather than a human, changes how the story meets your ears. But in terms of the pure ability to recreate the felt creative energy of reading a text, if you don't know, I have no doubt it will get there eventually. Do you disagree?
Philip Pullman
Think of it the other way round. Is there anything that might persuade you that Hamlet was written by AI?
Alex O'Connor
It's difficult to say, partly because Hamlet is so famous and iconic, and we want to say there's something so human about it, impossible to recreate. But I wonder if we're being technologically naive — the way chess grandmasters used to say a computer could play chess but couldn't be creative about it, couldn't make the beautiful sacrifices that need human intuition, and within five years it became impossible to beat a chess computer, no matter who you were. I sometimes think we're too optimistic in the same way about the arts, in a way that stops us putting safeguards in place to protect the human element, because we tell ourselves we don't need to worry about it.
Philip Pullman
It's a big question, and a very important one, and I have no idea of the answer.
Alex O'Connor
Of course nobody does. It's just that when I heard you say an AI will never replace a human brain, I think that's true in many contexts — but it struck me because the creative arts are probably the area where people are most fearful of losing the human spirit.
Philip Pullman
Well, yes — but I don't think they need to be. To me it's simple. We can imagine. AI can't imagine. All it can do is imitate. Thinking back to Coleridge again, and his distinction between primary and secondary imagination on one hand, and fancy on the other: what AI does falls firmly into the realm of fancy — taking stuff that already exists and putting it together in a different way. That's not imagining. AI can't imagine. That's not what it does. What it does is imitate bits of text that already exist.
Alex O'Connor
To some degree, though, isn't that partly what the human brain does too? We're creative beings, but Oasis didn't plagiarise the Beatles — even so, Oasis probably wouldn't exist without the Beatles. You need to have heard music to make music, seen things in the world to make things in the world; it doesn't just crop up from nothing. So even human imagination is, to an extent, a matter of taking all the input data — the stories you grew up on, the experiences you've had — and mixing them together, cutting and gluing bits from here and there, to make something new. What do you think is going on, extra, in human imagination, that the computer isn't doing?
Philip Pullman
One thing the computer isn't doing is feeling any joy in what it does. One of the basic impulses — probably the basic impulse — of all human creation is delight. I think of that extraordinary piece of ochre discovered in caves in southern Africa, about eighty thousand years old, with a little crosshatch pattern scored into it: lines going one way, then lines going the other. Some prehistoric person was sitting under a tree on a sunny day, with a full stomach, feeling pretty good about things, and there was this bit of stone, and they discovered they could make a mark on it — and then a pattern — oh, I can make another pattern. The making of patterns is the basis of all art, I think, and that simple business of scoring lines across other lines is probably the simplest example there is of a work of art — if you don't feel joy in the making of it, and joy in the perceiving of it, because other people would have looked at it and said, hey, that's good, make one for me, no, you can do it, you do it like this. Drums are a pattern too. We take delight in the way that encourages us to move. It's the element of joy and delight and pleasure and pride — that's what's missing in a computer. I don't know whether they can fake that — I don't know that we'd even know if they could — but that's what would be missing. It's only working through billions and billions of examples of what word comes after this word. It's not feeling any joy in it. It's not feeling any delight.
Alex O'Connor
Not for now.
Philip Pullman
Not for now. Who knows what's to come — stranger things have happened. But I'd cast suspicion on it, at least at this point.
Alex O'Connor
Philip Pullman, thank you so much for your time. It's been fun.
Philip Pullman
Thank you. I've enjoyed this very much.