What was the inspiration behind Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights series? How does he want readers to feel on Lyra’s final adventure in The Rose Field? Has his demon changed now that he has got to the end of this writing journey, and how do you say goodbye to characters you love?
In this special edition of Ask Penguin, host Rhianna Dhillon visits Philip Pullman at his Oxford home, surrounded by books (and barking cockapoos), to mark thirty years since the world met Lyra Belacqua in Northern Lights we ask the award-winning author reflects on a lifetime of storytelling, returning to Lyra’s world one final time in The Book of Dust series , The Rose Field.
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Episode Transcript
Rhianna Dhillon:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Ask Penguin, the podcast all about books, their authors and their publishers. I'm Brianna Dillon and I am recording this in Oxfordshire, actually from the home of Philip Pullman. I'm in his cottage. I am surrounded by books. You have no idea how exciting it is to be in the home of somebody whose books you have loved read for years to sort of sit in the same house that he wrote them in. It's incredible to look around and see some of his inspirations. There are also dogs running in and out. I think a dog walker is on his way, so if you hear yapping in the background, that's what that is. Philip Pullman is one of the most beloved and highly respected authors writing today, best known for the work of his dark materials. And this autumn sees the hugely anticipated final volume in the book of Dust as Philip revisits the world of Lyra and Pantaleon for the final time.
Philip is the winner of many prestigious awards, including the Carnegie of Carnegie's and the RIT Award. His dark materials has become a much loved classic with legions of fans across the globe, and it's sold millions of copies worldwide. So when reader's left Lyra in the secret Commonwealth, she was alone. She was in the ruins of a deserted city. Panta Lyman had run from her in search of her imagination, which he believed that she'd lost. And so Lara travelled across the world from her Oxford home in search of her demon. As for Malcolm, he journeyed far from home as well towards the silk roads in search of Lyra. Now, in the third and final instalment, the Rosefield, their quests converge in the most dangerous, breathtaking, and world changing ways. They take help from spies, thieves, gryphons witches, old friends, and of course new learning. All the while the depth and surprising truths of the Ter whilst around them, the world is a flame as they move east towards the red building that will reunite them and give them answers. So too does the magisterium at war Against all that Lara holds. Dear, it's my great honour to welcome Philip Pullman to Ask Penguin. Philip, thank you so much for joining us and inviting us into your home.
Phillip Pullman:
Thank you. It's a great pleasure.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Oh, hello. A dog has just wandered in. My dog has just wandered in
Phillip Pullman:
Being ushered out.
Rhianna Dhillon:
That was Mixy. That
Phillip Pullman:
Was Mixy.
Rhianna Dhillon:
So Philip, congratulations on the publication of the Rosefield here Between us. Beautiful copy. How does it feel now for this final instalment of Re's story to be out in the world?
Phillip Pullman:
Well, I'm glad I got there before I kicked the bucket because I'm pretty old now and I was quite young when I started. No, I've been writing it for 30 odd years. I wouldn't say it's been a wrench saying goodbye to it, but it was a definite feeling of, well, here we are. Goodbye. You're on your own. Now, best of luck
Rhianna Dhillon:
Can remember the last day that you actually finished writing tinkering what that felt like.
Phillip Pullman:
Yeah, relief.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Was it just relief
Phillip Pullman:
Because it's 30 years and I finished, it must've been eight times, eight or nine times, and my editor, who is very good and who has been saying this to me for 30 years, longer than that, 40 years, this ending is terrible. What? This ending is terrible. It's no good at all. Go back and do it again. No. Yes, he did. This is why I value his advice. He's always ripe bugger, and I have to go back and rewrite it, which I did, and it's much better as a result,
Rhianna Dhillon:
Really.
Phillip Pullman:
Well, he's a very good editor. He sees what works and what doesn't work. That's what you want in an editor as well as boundless encouragement and frequent reassurance that yes, you are the greatest writer never to win a Nobel Prize and so on and so forth. So no, he saw the weakness in the ending that I had and made me go away and think about it. So I thought about it and made it better.
Rhianna Dhillon:
That's really interesting. So did you always have in mind what the end was going to be and then you had to change that or did it come to you as you were writing?
Phillip Pullman:
I knew what the mood would be at the end. I always know that. But what precisely is contributing to this mood, the setting, which character's going to be there and so on. That remains to be discovered except for Lara. Of course, her name is the first name in Northern Lights and her name is the last word in this book. So it had to be her. And as for the rest of it, well, when you write however many thousand pages it is, you've got quite a large cast. The first ending doesn't work. You can go back and find somebody else who might do better in the last scene. And there are a lot of props lying around. I've used the litter a lot, of course, but there's also the prop that Lara is given in, I think the secret Commonwealth, which is the miama, this pack of cards, which has pictures on them. But as she discovers while thinking about it and talking about it, that miria Rama pictures are different from the pictures on the litter because the Lithia pictures are symbols. There's a candle or a camel or a globe, things that mean something. Whereas the pictures on the Miria Rama cards are scenes of people doing things. They're dynamic, there's something going on. They're pictures from a story in effect. So that's how she uses it because of course she's very good at telling stories. She loves telling stories, and I wanted that to be the conclusion of the book as well. So the last words are she's asked what she's going to do. She says, go on story telling stories. I expect said Lara, the end.
Rhianna Dhillon:
You're going to make me cry. Well carry on. So as you said, 30 years of writing this, it's the 30th anniversary of the publication of the Northern Lights. And we had a question in actually from listener Rose who asks, if you can take us back to the very beginning and tell us again about the initial inspiration for his dark materials and have those inspirations been threaded throughout all the way to the Rosefield?
Phillip Pullman:
I'm wary about using the word inspiration as I was wary about using the word imagination before I wrote this. The rosefield is the culmination of a long story in which RA has to discover her imagination, which is gone missing pan. Her demon tells her this in the previous book, the Secret Commonwealth, and she's bitterly hurt by it, and she goes off, and this book is the story of how she searched for it and found it in the end. So she knows through having looked for it and thought about it, what she means by the imagination, which is not I think what most people understand when they use that word. The other aspect of it, of course, is the rose field itself, which is a field like a magnetic field or a gravitational field, which is a space in which things are affected by well gravitation and nearby mass of a planet or the presence of an electric current or something else. Now, the rose, well, I won't tell you what the whole book is because I want people to read.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yes, no spoilers,
Phillip Pullman:
But it's all to do with the imagination.
Rhianna Dhillon:
The imagination, as you say, it crops up again and again. And there are different sort of interpretations of it. Pan talks to the gryphons at, I need to be careful about giving away spoilers, but they talk about a sort of internal world and an external
Phillip Pullman:
World
Rhianna Dhillon:
And metaphor,
Phillip Pullman:
And they have an external world, which they understand to be the world that we live in and so on. But they have an internal world which consists of everything, the universe, the stars, the moon, the past, the future, the present, everything. That's the internal world. So yeah, Lara's discovering these things and how she thinks about what the world is, what the universe is and so on. So it's really a long exploration of what these ideas can mean.
Rhianna Dhillon:
When you sort of began writing this particular part of RA's story, did you already have all of the information that you needed from his dark materials? Is that always sort of present? Do you have to go back leaf through kind of mine, your own books for what you
Phillip Pullman:
Talked about? Yeah, I do have to do that. There's a very good book called The Elements of His Dark Materials, which was written by an American academic who'd studied the first series thoroughly. Every character is named, every reference is checked in there. So I had a sort of encyclopaedia, but you still have to look things up. There's a character in this book called Mustafa Bay. His name had appeared in the previous book, and I thought, well, I was writing this one now. I wanted that name to sound sort of Arabic, but maybe I better check maybe Bay doesn't mean what I thought it meant. I just look it up. I Googled it and it sent me a reference to Mustafa Bay in Wikipedia and I read it and it said Mustafa Bay character in the book written by Philip Pauler. So he's referring me as an authorities to my own books.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Excellent. We had another question from Raa who's asked, would you ever write about Will's life after returning to his world? Because they love to hear what he's been doing parallel to Lyra's story. And I have to say, will was one of my first literary loves. I think,
Phillip Pullman:
Oh, well, I better work out what he's been doing in wa. No, I think in one of the little notes or extra bits or booklets or something I wrote, I implied that Will was by the time we were reading it. In other words, 10 years after his adventure with ra, it was a medical student and knowing his own demon, he meets her in the course of the ambu eyeglass. Of course, he's able to talk with her and communicate with her and think what advantage that would be to a doctor because his demon could talk to the patient's demon and find out a lot more than, I mean doctors gauge a lot anyway, not only from what the patient says, but from the way they walk and they come into the room from the expression in their eyes, from their speed of their, all those things. Doctors are reading those things. And if your demon could talk to the doctor's demon and tell it other things that the patient didn't know about themselves, it would be a great help in diagnosis.
Rhianna Dhillon:
That's true. So in that world, because in Well's world, which is our world world, there are no other external demons just will no,
Phillip Pullman:
But we have demons and will learns with a great shock, I think at the end of the pylos to see his own demon. And this is a great gift which she has, which I'm implying that we all could have and we all have a demon of some sort just as the old idea of a guardian angel or a spirit animal or something that some cultures have. And it's just another way of thinking about yourself, and it's a way of finding metaphors. For example, there's a character who's a profoundly melancholic, like people we know who've suffering from deep depression. Well, that's what happens when you don't like your demon or your demon doesn't like you. That's a subtle psychological state, which I could find a picture for with that image. And in the Secret Commonwealth, the book that precedes this as one of my favourite characters, the old princess who got a demon because her demon when she was younger, fell in love with someone else and went off with her. Now these are all pictures of psychological states that we've all been in one way or another, and it's just a very vivid way of picturing it.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I do love the Princess. She's also a great storyteller. So as I've mentioned, it's the final instalment of Lyra's story, but did you kind of have an idea of where all of the characters, I know you said the ending sort of finds you find it, it's a process, but do you kind of give all of your characters an ending or do you just sort of send them out into the world with Pope?
Phillip Pullman:
Oh yes. I hope they're all, well, I hope they're all flourishing and succeeding. I dunno, because that's not my business anymore.
My business is with telling the story that I've told and taking it to the point where they're at on the last page. There's something political in this process because when I'm writing a book, I'm a dictator, I'm a tyrant. I can order life and death. I can have complete control over them, and I won't have any suggestions. I don't want any arguments. I don't want anything of that sort. I'm the boss. But when the book is finished and published out there in the bookshops, it's not mine anymore. Or rather the political relationship has changed. It's now the book on its own in a marketplace, talking with lots of other books, talking to the people who read it and the readers of the book, their views about what it means and so on are perfectly valid. Mine aren't any more valid. I've got a view about the book. The book means because I've read it like them, but just because I wrote it doesn't mean I know what it means for good and all. It's a democratic process there. So from being a dictatorship, it turns into a democracy
Rhianna Dhillon:
Because obviously our understanding of the world changes all the time. And the more that we learn, the more that we soak up. So in the 30 years that you've been developing Lyra's Worlds, has your view of her stories changed?
Phillip Pullman:
Well, the world has changed as you point out and changed, I think largely for the worse. We've now got political changes happening in Europe, in this country, in America that are verging on the dangerous,
Verging on them, depressing. So yes, things have changed a lot. My view of some things as clarified, I was always suspicious of big business and so on. But having thought about it and read during these 30 years, I now have a much clearer idea of why big corporations are bad. Their actions are largely bad, and why big corporations are responsible for most of the bad things that are going on in the world. They subsidise and fund bad politicians who do bad things. They subsidise and fund the destruction of the climate and the atmosphere, which has been happening more and more intensively. And it's big corporations looking for money that do that. And my view of that has clarified and strengthened.
Rhianna Dhillon:
You've said in the past that you've never intended to keep returning to Lyra and her story, but yet you have,
Phillip Pullman:
Well, what a mistake
Rhianna Dhillon:
To everyone's great thrill. You've come back. What is it about these characters that have kept you coming back? What is it about Lyra? What is it about the other characters that you've been drawing over the years?
Phillip Pullman:
Well, mainly with Lyra, it was a sense that her story hadn't finished. She comes at the end of the Amber Spyglass, the first trilogy, his type materials, 11 or 12 years old or something. She's had this immense adventure. She's been to the North Pole, she's gone through the world of the dead. What's she going to do now? Go to school and play netball or something, no matter.
Rhianna Dhillon:
We had to go through that with her and go to school and play
Phillip Pullman:
Netball. Well, that's why I'm writing all things that you should have done but you didn't or could have done. But so of course she's going to grow up and in the course of growing up, she's going to change and it's going to be difficult for her as it is for all of us in adolescence, and she's going to become a difficult, awkward, rude, unpleasant child in some ways. And she does, and poor old Malcolm has a terrible time when he's teaching here, but she's growing up and coming to a new vision of what she is herself.
I mean, at the end of the am Spyglass, she discovered how to fall in love by being told a story about falling in love and by remembering a little gesture, which when she repeated, she knew that will remembered it as well. He was here when the story was being told. So they both knew what it meant when she lifted up the little red fruit and put it to his mouth. And that's how we all fall in love. We've heard stories about it. We've read about people falling in love and when it happens to us, we know what it is that's happening. So she's growing up in that way and she's also growing up in ways that have to do with well, understanding politics and economics and that sort of
Rhianna Dhillon:
Thing. Yeah, sorry, just hearing you talking about falling along.
Phillip Pullman:
Got
Rhianna Dhillon:
You really
Phillip Pullman:
Did.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Sorry, I
Phillip Pullman:
Didn't mean to do that.
Rhianna Dhillon:
No, that was really lovely. You also capture what it feels like to be a child and also and a young adult, what it is to grow up. It's so perfect. And I think the reason that we reread, we can reread your books again and again is we're always kind of reminded of what it is to be that age for you. How easy is it for you to tap into that point in your life where everything is sort of in flux and you are learning so much about yourself?
Phillip Pullman:
I remember it very well. I remember when I was going through adolescence and puberty and falling in love and all that sort of stuff, and discovering about politics and arguing with friends about what we believed and what we didn't believe and all that sort of stuff. It was a very vivid and exciting time of my life. So I remember it for that. But also I remember teaching children when I was a teacher about 10 years in a middle school. I taught children from nine to 13. We had that system in Oxford. I remember teaching the children in the older classes, which I mainly did, and seeing them change as they got older, they would become self-conscious in an interesting way because your body's changing.
It's changing shape. Your voice changes if you are a boy. It's all embarrassing and you're aware of these things much more physically and closely and intimately than you ever were before. And it's all new and it's exciting and it's difficult and it's sometimes impossible, but it's tremendously moving and exciting. So I'm remembering that. I was remembering that as I wrote this and I'm just now starting to write a memoir spelled M-E-M-W-A-H memoir, which well, so far I've been dealing with my early childhood and I had an interesting childhood I think because we moved all over the world before I was 11 and travel by sea, which was exciting. And people don't do now they get in a metal tube and get out the other end. But I remember that period quite well and I'm sort of recalling it now with the help of photographs. And
Rhianna Dhillon:
Sadie Smith talks in her book of essays, I think she quotes or she quotes, Celia Paul, I've always been, I remain at nearly 60, the same person that I was as a teenager. Is that something that resonates with you?
Phillip Pullman:
Yes, because the picture of growing, the picture of growing up that we sometimes get, especially from people concerned with education as you've done this now you move on to that before you do that over there, you've got to do this here. It's like moving along like a monkey, moving along a stick or a branch. My view of growing up and I'm going to balance my class on the sofa while I gesticulate is more like getting bigger. You grow bigger by including more things, but you don't move away from the old things. Actually, some of us do and some of us never. I would grow up in a more useful and inclusive way. We just pretended we were earth like Charlie's stuff behind, but it's still there, really.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah, we obviously were just talking about love there and Lyra's, great love being will in his dark materials. And then there's a possibility as she grows up that it might be mal, but of course her longest, most constant relationship, the biggest love of her life is Pan. So how do you think that her three great love serve her at different points of her life?
Phillip Pullman:
Well, they are very different. Her relationship with Pan is deeper than love. It is being, they are the same being and although they can be estranged, it's never a complete separation. He's always there and he will always be there and they will always be together. Her relationship with Will, well, it's her first falling in love her kiss, her first sense of this extraordinary, and I remember describing towards the end of the Emma Spy Glass, she had the feeling as she hears the story from Mary about how she fell in love as she listened to. It feels a great palace lighting up inside her and all the lights coming on and all the windows, and this is what she feels herself to be and all the possibilities. That's what her relationship with Will a romantic relationship will bring to her relationship with Malcolm is, well, that's explored in this book, and I don't want to say too much about it here, but it's easier to describe from his point of view perhaps he in Bel Sage see her when she's a baby and his natural instinct is to protect her and look after her, which he does. And skillfully and bravely. He keeps a safe walk through the flood and brings her back to the place which will be her home. So he has that feeling of guardianship, protectiveness, which he might like to turn into a romantic feeling, but it doesn't quite, and the feeling of being that she might have from it, the feeling of being protected
Is not exactly what you need from a romantic relationship either. It might be part of it, but it's not the whole thing. So she's learning all these things and all these subtle difficulties and differences as she goes on. And so I hope is the reader. And so
Rhianna Dhillon:
You talk about this sort of betrayal between RA and Pan and there is a sort of back and forth about them almost betraying each other, thinking about metaphor and especially about them being the same being. How were you thinking about somebody almost betraying themselves
Phillip Pullman:
When she goes into the world of the dead? This isn't a spoiler, it's in the previous book. When she goes into the world of the dead, she discovers that she has to leave pan behind. She can't take him into the world of the dead, but she's got to go into the world of the dead in order to rescue her friend Roger, who has died. And so with terrible pain and terrible difficulty, she says to Pam, no, you can't come. You can't come. You stay here. And I picture him as a little puppy, why have you left me behind? Don't do it. Don't do it. Which is awful for them both. And this has been foretold almost from the first chapter or the first few chapters of Northern Lights when the master of Jordan College who has read the Ter and knows what will happen up to an extent, says to his friend the librarian, she'll be involved in a great betrayal and she will be the betrayer. And that's what that is. We sort of know it's coming because we've heard that we dunno exactly what it is. She certainly doesn't, they're reunited at the end of course, but he will always remember this and perhaps never quite feel safe, never quite trust her. And she will always feel a little bit guilt about. But she had to do it. She had to do, she made a promise. Well, you make a promise, you must keep it as she's reminded by y.
If you promise something, you must do it. So we are caught up in these terrible paradoxes which involve conflicting emotions which are both valid, both true, and we must obey them both.
Rhianna Dhillon:
You're of course a storyteller by profession. And storytelling is such a huge part within all of your stories because as she loses her imagination a little bit in the secret Commonwealth, but actually in the Rosefield, there are moments where she's remembering what it is to become another character, to flesh out another person's life, make up details. So how important do you think storytelling is just in our day-to-day lives and the way that we speak to each other?
Phillip Pullman:
Well, whether or not you think it is important, we do it all the time. Do you know what happened to me this morning? I saw so-and-so with her, not, yes, really. We might call it gossip or we just retelling something we saw on the East Enders last week or whatever it was. But we are always telling each other stories the whole time. To say that we've outgrown stories is nonsense. We even talk about the narrative of a party in polity. What's the labour narrative? What's it going to be?
Because stories are fundamental ways of understanding ourselves and understanding the universe. And I was very interested in seeing how they crop up old story patterns. People say there are only seven stories in the world. And so you say, alright, what are they? And so they think of seven stories and then you say, well no, you are wrong. There are in fact, it's ridiculous. Say there are only seven stories. There are in fact 11 and I'll tell you what they're, but this is a wonderful game and we can go on playing it for hours and hours. But you do begin to notice similarities. What is it, for example, about the Cinderella story that makes it recur all over the world in different cultures and different languages? Why does it keep coming up and what is it about that story that makes it the Cinderella story and not another story? I listened to a lecture once by an American academic about the Cinderella story, why Jane Eyre was a Cinderella story.
The further she went on, the more I wanted to stand up say, no, you are wrong. It isn't a Cinderella story because it didn't have the fairy godmother in it, the fairy godmother or the sister of the invisible one or the rose tree that grows from her mother's grave or the dove that comes to sit on the rose tree. There's always a figure in a genuine sin of the story who is an older woman who represents either her lost mother at all events, an older woman who can help her through the change from being a girl to being a woman who can help her become, what's the old word?
We used to think fleshy on something, but actually means in the strict sense means ready for marriage. Now it's a mother's duty and the old idea to help her child, her daughter, not make herself, show her to put makeup on, not that sort of thing at all, but teach her the things that will make her become and remain attractive. In the version of the Cinderella story called Mossy Coat, the mother makes a beautiful coat out of moss for her daughter to wear. And when it's finished, the girl will be ready to be married. And that's how it happens in the story. Now, Jane Eyre is like Cinderella only in one respect in that she starts off poor and is rich, that's all. But there is no figure in it remotely like the dead mother or the fairy godmother or the cow who speaks to her and tells her the secret or the sister of the invisible. No one liked that at all in Jane. Now therefore, it's not a Cinderella story, but you can see this pattern all the way through. I remember a film, very good film called The Phantom Thread.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yes.
Phillip Pullman:
Do you ever see that?
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah, Daniel. Daniel. It's
Phillip Pullman:
About the dress maker who becomes kind of prisoner of the model and she keeps poisoning him so that she can save him at the end and make him better. And so on. Discussing this with my editor David Fickling afterwards, after we saw the film, we worked out that it's a version of Beauty and the Beast. He's the beast, the powerful male, older, sexually dominating creature. She's the frail feminine little prisoner apparently. And yet she dominates him at the end just as she does in Beauty and the Beast. He's her prisoner in the end. So you're seeing these patterns recur and turn up again and again. I think it's fascinating, and I used to talk about it with my students when I taught students, and I talk about it with Fickling now and with anybody else whose ear I can bend.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I loved all of those references. So interesting. And I think people will question that, the idea of the Cinderella story because Mr. Rochester as well is not the Prince charming for everybody.
Phillip Pullman:
No, he's not. He's not in fact. But he's reduced like the beast. He's reduced in the end. He's crippled, he's maimed, he's blinded. Finally he's ready to marry Cinderella.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I know. It's so depressing. Now said, to bring it back to the demons for a second, that you've said in previous interviews that your demon would be a raven, a bird that steals things. And you use this as a way to sort of explain your writing process. So can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Phillip Pullman:
Well, I've been asked ever since the first book came out,
What I think my demon is, and I have to explain that you can't choose your demon. I might want to have a tiger or something as a demon, but you can't choose. And if you end up with a snail, that's it. It's your nature that chooses. But a raven is a good example of what a demon does because demons help. They do research that you haven't had time to do yourself by going and talking to the doctor's demon, all that sort of stuff. And writers steel, I think it was TS Elliot who said, bad writers imitate, good writers steal or something like that. But then you see everybody who's told a story has learned how stories are shaped by reading stories themselves or by listening to stories. We are at home in the world of stories. So it's not surprising that when you come to writing a story
Rhianna Dhillon:
Is that mixy again,
Phillip Pullman:
You listen to advice sometimes from other writers. Sometimes what writers say is rubbish.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah. When you say it's rubbish, do you mean that they're not really taking their own advice? That's not really the advice that they would be giving or
Phillip Pullman:
Yeah. Well, it's advice that doesn't work.
Rhianna Dhillon:
That doesn't work.
Phillip Pullman:
But always make a plan first. Making a plan doesn't work for me. The first novel I wrote, I thought I must make a plan what I'm supposed to do. So I wrote a plan, it was great plan, went off for pages and pages took me months, and then I should throw it away because I've done the story, I've fed up with it. So when I go to schools now and talk to peoples who are writing stories, I said, write the story first and then write the plan. Because your plan will be just like the story and you'll get more marks, but also because it's more fun like this, that sort of thing. Or, oh, I only write when I'm inspired. That's nonsense too. Most of the time you're not inspired.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Really?
Phillip Pullman:
Whatcha going to do then stop?
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah.
Phillip Pullman:
Or writer's block. Oh, it's a terrible thing. Writer's block. You don't get plumber's block or doctors block, do you? Why should you be the profess that's allowed to stop whenever it feels like watching the football match on the telly? You're not not allowed to stop if you're blocked, write anything, write something else, write dialogue, dialogue's. Very easy.
Hello? Hello. How are you? Oh, that's about yourself. Fine. I've been away. Have you? Where you been? Portugal. Oh really? Do you like it? No, not very much. Yeah, there's a page already.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I would listen to you do that all day. Well, so Alice, one of our listeners wanted to know how much do you feel like classic books have been involved in your stories?
Phillip Pullman:
Oh, a great deal because I love reading and I love reading poetry especially. And I love reading great books that I haven't read before, which might tell me something I know or might give me a point of view on being human that I hadn't had before and I steal from 'em. Of course,
Rhianna Dhillon:
Like the reen in you.
Phillip Pullman:
Yeah. Yes, that's right. Well, if I see a new way of depicting human nature or human character, of course I'll have it. Of course, if I can use it, I'll take it. There's no copyright. Well, it's copyright on words, but not on ideas really. And some writer's advice is good. Like Raymond Chandler who said, when in doubt have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand. That's the best advice ever.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Tell us a bit more about that.
Phillip Pullman:
Well, if you don't know whether your story's going to go next and you're a bit stuck, have something happen that you weren't expecting, not only that the characters weren't expecting, but you weren't having a new person arrive. Someone's just moved in next door. Who are they? What do they want? And what's going on? Who's that over? Just have something happen that you weren't expecting.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Can you think of any examples of that in this series?
Phillip Pullman:
Yes. The character whom I like very much. Abdel ies.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I knew you were going to say Needies.
Phillip Pullman:
Yeah, I
Rhianna Dhillon:
Love him.
Phillip Pullman:
Oh good. I'm very, very fond of him. He turned up at the end of the secret Commonwealth and I didn't know him at all. And then he started talking and I thought, hello, welcome to the story Mr. Ez. We'll see a lot more of you. I hope
Rhianna Dhillon:
That was excellent. Because you don't trust him as soon as he comes in. You don't trust him because you don't know him. He's a very slippery character. And then the trust builds as you get to know him
Phillip Pullman:
And slips away as he does some slips. That's it. And you dunno who he is or what he is.
Rhianna Dhillon:
And it's so brilliant because so many people are unknowable and we're supposed to immediately trust them.
Phillip Pullman:
Yeah, well I was very fond of and he, I'm delighted that he turned up and welcomed him to the story.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I'm glad to see him back in the Rosefield. Also, I think Alice was talking about borrowing inspirations from philosophy to science to literature. So what is still inspiring you today? I know you were talking about inspirations, maybe not being quite the right word, but
Phillip Pullman:
What of inform? Yeah. Well, I'm interested in all sorts of things, but particularly in what I can understand of science.
I like the kind of books that don't have too many equations in them that I can slide past them or sort of edge along the corridor, avoiding the equations. But that interests me very much. And also, yes, philosophy. What is consciousness? What does it mean to be conscious? Now I know I made a matter because everything inside me is physical. It's atoms and molecules and fundamental particles and all sorts of things. But they made a matter. But I'm conscious, I know I'm conscious. So is matter conscious or is it matter only conscious when it's got a soul? What is a soul? DeHart said, we have bodies and souls, but they're quite different. Was he right or was he wrong? Now that question, which nobody's settled and I don't think anybody will settle, occurs in various forms all the way through this book has done since the beginning. Other questions to what is dark matter? When I began to write this story 30 odd years ago, nobody knew what dark matter was. We know it's there because the galaxies and gravity wouldn't behave the way it does if there weren't dark matter, which we dunno what it is. We can't see. Oh, I hope they don't discover it before I finish Northern Lights.
And they still haven't discovered it.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Few.
Phillip Pullman:
So I am still free to think about it. Dark energy was new then too,
Rhianna Dhillon:
Really.
Phillip Pullman:
But if you've got an idea like dust, you can stretch it a bit to include all sorts of things. So yes, I'm interested in all sorts of things.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah, you just took me right back to being with Mary Malone at the computer talking to the Angels. And that was such a brilliant introduction, I think for so many people to thinking about ideas that would never have crossed my mind otherwise or I would've been introduced to in such a dry way.
Phillip Pullman:
Yeah. One of the advantages of living in Oxford is that someone just down the road who can tell you anything and everything, of
Rhianna Dhillon:
Course, a great network.
Phillip Pullman:
The cloud Chamber for example, which Diara the cleaner, manages to reconstruct in the ruins of the research station. I was able to ask someone who had been involved in writing a book about the cloud chamber and actually show me one working, which was extraordinary dry ice and the vapour forms in that. And it can show you the track of particles from space, basically Cosmic rays. There are ones that twirl in a spiral and then disappear. And they were one sort of particle and one that goes straight through and they're another sort of particle and so on. And I thought, well Ro to see this at some stage anyway, so I get Diara the cleaner to make one out of the bit and pieces Shiva, which you can because it's a very simple thing and you can make it in your kitchen. It's a fabulously wonderful idea. And I thought, well, if the Romans had this, they would immediately start interpreting it. You're going on a journey. You wanted to be successful. Let's see. That's what the cosmic rays say. So you could ring up your cloud chamber and use it for fortune telling.
Rhianna Dhillon:
So we've talked about your inspirations, but how does it feel still knowing that so many people have been inspired by your stories and your characters and how many lyra's there are now in the world because of you?
Phillip Pullman:
Yeah, I feel a bit responsible for that. No, I always wish 'em very well. And whenever I sign a book for a liar, I always put for the real liar. Well, it's extraordinary. It's not the same thing as writing. It's not the same thing as telling a story. It's one of the consequences of telling a story. And if you are lucky as I've been, what you have to do some of the time is not right or talk about it, you administer the consequences of having written. There was a time when I got lots and lots of fan letters before the Ammos Spyglass came out because people wanted to know what's going to happen, what's going to happen, what's going to happen. I had to type out different responses for what letters I got. I had one for this book, another for that book, another for, and it was so many. But then along came the internet and snail mail dropped away a bit. But a lot of what you do as a writer is administering the consequences of having written
Rhianna Dhillon:
As this is the final book. And many people are going to be sort of, I think reflecting on their own journey with the adventures that they've taken alongside Lyra and Pan as I've been. We had a question from Emma who asks, what do you hope that people are going to take away from the Rosefield but also Lyra's story more widely?
Phillip Pullman:
Well, I have a facetious answer for this. What do I want 'em to take away? I want 'em to take away the urgent and undeniable desire to go out and buy my next book,
Rhianna Dhillon:
Which is,
Phillip Pullman:
I dunno what it's no, but what I want to do. It's just the sense of having experienced and enjoyed a story of having been on an adventure, of having shared in someone's growing up.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I think yours is still one of the very few books that I will read anew and gasp out loud and sort of almost heckle the characters and shout and engage with verbally.
Phillip Pullman:
Well, that's very good of you. And to make it extra certain you should buy a new copy every time.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I absolutely will. And also because this is, I was telling you just before we started recording about how I started with the Subtle Knife out of order, but then of course Belle LeBel Cavage can also be a beginning as can the Northern Lights. Does it matter to you if there is a different order in which people read them compared to how you've published them?
Phillip Pullman:
Well, I get asked that sometimes. I say generally the best order is the order they were published in, because that's when I myself was learning the story and learning how to tell it. So it's probably, if you haven't read any of 'em, probably best to start with Northern Lights and so on. But I can't tell people what to do. If people want to start in the middle, that's fine. If a story works for them. Even finer.
Rhianna Dhillon:
So you just said Bio next book. Are we to await something new from you've got a memoir that you're writing?
Phillip Pullman:
It might be that.
Rhianna Dhillon:
It might be that,
Phillip Pullman:
It might be that. But I'm, I've been away away from my desk for a few months now since finishing this one. I haven't got out of the habit of it, of writing I in and sitting at my desk, but there's been no single project on hand, but I think it might be my memoir.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Are there any stories, you said Lyra's story had felt unfinished to you, which is why you wanted to go back. Are there any other characters from the world whose stories
Phillip Pullman:
Finished? Oh yeah. I'd like to know what happens to Will. I'd like to know
Rhianna Dhillon:
We all would.
Phillip Pullman:
Yeah, I'd like to follow Abdel Leonis to see what he gets up to next. Yes, there are. But you see readers are free to think of those for themselves. And if they come up with the version of it, I'm certainly not going to say, no, no, you're wrong. She did this. Not that you're completely wrong. Got it all wrong. No, they're telling the story. It's their story at that point.
Rhianna Dhillon:
The Rosefield, the book of Dust volume three is out now. Wherever you get your books. Philip Pullman, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Phillip Pullman:
Thank you very much. It's been a great pleasure.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Thank you so much for listening. And another huge thank you to Philip Pullman from myself and the whole of the Penguin team for inviting us into his home to discuss Lyra and all of her worlds. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, happy reading.