Philip Pullman: Writing for children gives me freedom

Philip Pullman is giving the opening talk at a Liverpool literary festival. Laura Davis meets the creator of His Dark Materials

Liverpool Daily Post, October 17, 2008: archived on Nexus

WHEN he walks into a room, papers shuffle themselves out of their neat piles and books wriggle forward on their shelves.

Inside Philip Pullman's head, umpteen novels are fastidiously catalogued in their different stages - from embryonic concept to bestseller - but the world around him constantly shifts, moving into disarray as soon as his back is turned.

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"Objects and books especially just become disordered when I walk into a room. They multiply," reveals the award-winning children's author woefully.

"I'm sure every time I go into a room there are more books in it than when I left. I can't keep things tidy and that's a great failing. I regret it very much but there we are."

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As a result, his study is filled with clutter - power tools, guitars, an accordion and pieces of wood as well as shelves upon shelves of books.

These used to be kept in the garden shed where he wrote his first stories, but Pullman passed the shed on to an illustrator friend when he moved house - on condition he gave it to another writer when he'd finished with it.

One area where the Northern Lights author does manage to maintain obsessive control is in the physical process of writing his fiction.

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He must under no circumstances, he explains, veer from the custom of using a ballpoint pen on A4 narrow-lined paper. Each sheet is obliged to be printed with a grey or blue margin and punched with two holes. Pullman, 61, is so much in the grip of this superstition that it is hard to imagine what would happen should there be a sudden deficit of this particular type of paper. Would he collapse into a coma? Would all the books tumble off his shelves in a landslide of words? Would we hear no more of Sally and Lyra, the feisty heroines of his stories?

Fortunately, both for Pullman and his fans, this disastrous situation is unlikely ever to occur.

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"Well, I was worried that would happen, but I've bought such a large amount of that particular paper now," he admits.

"I thought they'd stop making it, you see, but I found a supplier and I've bought so much that it'll see me out and there'll be plenty left after I've gone."

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Aside from this quirk, the former schoolteacher appears incredibly laid back, explaining in gentle tones that, while the film and TV versions of his books aren't always exactly as he imagined them (Ruby in the Smoke was filmed on location in Liverpool), he is content to hand over control to the producers.

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"They've paid me for it, it's their job from then on," he says with a smile in his voice.

"I do have an interest, of course. I want it to be done well and I want it to be done as closely to the book as makes sense, but you have to change some things, you have to leave a lot out when you're making a film of a book.

"I know how little influence and how little power the writer has to make much difference, and I've always found it completely fruitless to fight battles you're not going to win. I've tended to just shrug my shoulders."

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His relaxed attitude extends to the debate over His Dark Materials, Pullman's trilogy that begins with Northern Lights, made into a film (The Golden Compass) starring Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra, alongside Nicole Kidman and Wirral-born Daniel Craig.

Published in 1995, Northern Lights was condemned as "blasphemy" by the Catholic press for portraying a weak, Godlike character, "The Authority", although he is not the "Creator" of the book's series of parallel worlds.

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Its fans by far outnumber its critics, however - the book won the Carnegie Medal for children's fiction and the third part, The Amber Spyglass, became the first children's book to receive the Whitbread Book of the Year award.

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"I didn't expect that reaction to the book at all, it was just a subject that interested me. I thought people would read it for the story and then they'd read something else," says Pullman of His Dark Materials' religious theme.

"It's interesting because it's obviously very important to people and I am very glad to have - what have I done? - to have provided another set of images to ask that question with."

Readers who were saddened to leave Lyra behind on the last page of the Amber Spyglass and wave goodbye to Sally Lockhart, the Victorian self-styled detective, at the end of The Tin Princess, will be excited to learn Pullman is planning to resurrect both characters.

He likes writing series of books starring the same protagonists because "it saves making up new ones" but also because "I thought there's more to life in these characters, they can come back out in another story" as if Sally & Co were in a cupboard somewhere waiting patiently for him to think up a new plot.

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"You can't guarantee the readers will have read the previous books, but, if they have . . ." says Pullman, who was born in Norwich and educated in Zimbabwe and Australia before settling in North Wales after his father's death, "there's a feeling of familiarity which has been a great help to writers. We're all familiar of what it means when Holmes and Watson are sitting comfortably in their rooms in Baker Street having breakfast or something, and there's a knock on the door . . ."

Pullman is interested in his readers' entire experience, from the front cover to the typeface inside. Northern Lights and its sequel, The Subtle Knife, contain symbolic illustrations at the start of each chapter, which the author drew himself.

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"I'm more able to interfere in that sort of thing than I am in the filming of my books," says the father-of-two.

"The book as a physical object is a marvellous invention. It's never been surpassed in the hundreds of years since it's been invented.

"The idea of sticking together a number of leaves of paper along one edge so that you can carry them about and they don't fall out or get in disorder if you drop it on the floor and it doesn't need a battery - it's such a wonderful invention that it will never ever be surpassed, not even by these electronic readers people are using now."

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Despite his enthusiasm for the traditional book, Pullman admits he may one day be tempted by a digital reading device (his wife already owns one). If only to lighten his suitcase.

But one opinion he will not be swayed on is his opposition of age-banding in children's fiction - printing an age guide on the cover of books.

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"This is a very bad idea because it limits. It says to some children this book isn't for you: You're not allowed in here, you're not wanted, you're not welcome," he explains.

"I want to give them as many reasons as possible to feel they are welcome into my books because I really don't write them with a particular age of child in mind.

"Many of the most passionate arguments against the idea come from teachers or librarians faced with the task of putting a book into a child's hands who may get laughed at for reading something which is said to be too young for them, or get discouraged by the fact that they can't read the books that are supposed to be the ones for their age."

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Pullman, who never states the age of his protagonists so his readers feel they could be the characters' friends, finds a freedom in writing for children which he argues authors of adult fiction do not.

"Friends of mine, who write for adults, might write crime stories and they want to write a historical novel or a love story or something but the publisher says 'No, you can't do that, you're a crime novelist, you're not known for this, we'll have to give you much less money, you'll have to have a pseudonym, you'll have to start again.

 "When you write books for children, you can write about whatever you like, and you're not pigeonholed in the same way, which I find a great freedom.

You're not stuck doing one kind of thing."