Philip Pullman - Looking through a glass darkly

By NICK SMITH

English author Philip Pullman is a cynical curmudgeon: "I believe in the virtue of healthy exercise and a moderate diet - for other people."

"It makes them feel virtuous and makes them feel good, if not happy," says the 54-year-old British writer of "fiction that is read by young people."

Reporters must choose their words carefully when labelling the author's work. Pullman, on the phone from his shed in Oxford (the one at the bottom of his garden in which he penned his phenomenally successful His Dark Materials trilogy), gets irascible about this - it is not kidult, senior fiction or even fantasy, I am informed, because those terms deter more readers than they include. Another hint: don't mention C.S. Lewis. Pullman can fulminate at length on the subject of Lewis' thinly veiled Christian parable, the Narnia series. Forget about war, religion is Pullman's bete noire.

All of which makes the writer a fascinating, agreeable and entertaining interview subject, his dialogue spiced with irreverent humour, insight and pleasing invective.

His success allows him a certain licence to criticise. Certainly in New Zealand, the final instalment of his trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, while not rivalling the unparalleled publishing success of Harry Potter, has astonished retailers by clocking up more than 10,000 sales during the past six weeks. Worldwide sales have pushed Pullman into the stellar circles of the giants of the genre: Ursula Le Guin, Alan Garner, Susan Cooper.

He deserves the comparison.

His Dark Materials is undoubtedly a work of genius, a dark and complex work that disturbs and inspires in equal measure, underpinned by an encompassing humanism that should make these three novels required reading in every school. That is, if the books aren't already burning on the pyre for Pullman's blasphemy.

In Pullman's world, the Church is the source of all evil, intent on suppressing freedom of expression and sexuality and headed by the despot, The Authority.

It is Milton's Paradise Lost told from a different perspective, the emphasis placed not on the loss of innocence but the gaining of experience.

"It is blasphemous [but] this is something that I'm prepared to go to the stake for because I firmly and passionately believe in what I'm saying," he says. "I think that as soon as you start organising people into belief systems - priesthoods, officialdom - it just becomes one more political system, the fundamental purpose of which is to increase the power of the people who are in charge.

"You don't have to look very hard back at history - it's a glum, miserable sort of history.

"Well, I expected a lot more [protest following publication of The Amber Spyglass], there was less than I anticipated - I'm a bit surprised really," he says, sounding disappointed.

"I think that the Americans [from whom he expected the most outrage] have had something else on their minds for the past month or so."

Still, at least the Anglican Church in England satisfied his desire for controversy by describing the trilogy as "the stuff of nightmares" and "more deserving of the bonfire than Harry Potter."

Perhaps His Dark Materials will not attract such opprobrium until presented to schoolchildren in the classroom, a proposition with which he guardedly concurs.

Pullman gets his dander up when told of Australian psychologists' criticism of teenage fiction as too depressing, obsessed with suicide, unwanted pregnancy and general glumness. He describes the critics as idiots and the argument as "screaming nonsense."

Then there is C.S. Lewis: "[The Narnia series] it's disgusting, it's anti-life. If adults read them with clear and thoughtful attention, they would be shocked."

He is particularly outraged that the children's reward after surviving their adventures is death in a train accident - "I think [the books] are poisonous."

Pullman, brought up in the Church of England and admitting to an enjoyment of hymns, has no bad personal experience of Christianity to explain his hatred of religion. He spent his childhood travelling around the world, including Australia, before returning to Britain at "a time when children were allowed to roam anywhere, to play in the streets, to wander over hills."

He took to teaching, eventually settling in Oxford, where he still lives, and based his first children's novel, The Ruby in the Smoke, on a play he penned for his students.

He also makes no apology for writing a difficult work for his audience, which does vary widely in age, saying, "It's got to have some sort of moral ballast to it, as it were." Besides, it is "not the audience but the story itself" that matters, the "feeling and thoughts and ideas that the story contains" which are of paramount importance. "Put the story first, this is an artistic enterprise," he says.

He has warm regard for New Zealand, citing Margaret Mahy as one of his favourite authors and the much beloved Magic Pudding as a formative influence.

There are also questions about Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. This is not because Pullman is concerned about the adaptation. This is business. If the Rings movies succeed, then chances are that the filming of His Dark Materials will start. He has sold the rights but says the project depends upon Jackson succeeding.

As for the legion of fans, The Amber Spyglass is not the end of His Dark Materials. As Tolkien did in his Silmarillian, Pullman intends delving back into the history of his parallel universe, telling the stories of Texan aviator Lee Scoresby and witch queen Sarafina Pekkala.