HisDarkMaterials.org

This article is about the BBC Radio 4 dramatization.

His Dark Materials
Philip Pullman
dramatised by Lavinia Murray
running time 8hrs
BBC Audiobooks Limited Edition

The central story is based on the third chapter of Genesis. It is the struggle to find the answer to the question: 'Why are we here?' It is also about the loss of innocence and the process of understanding right from wrong.

This dramatisation was first broadcast on Radio 4 in January 2003. The impressive cast includes Terence Stamp and Ray Fearon. Lulu Popplewell as Lyra is consistently strong but Will, played by Daniel Anthony, struggles to keep pace with the strength of the storyline. For Pullman fans of all ages, this beautiful black-and-red box, with its classy sleeve notes and matt-black CDs, is worth every penny, not least for the bonus CD which includes an interview with Philip Pullman himself.

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This is an article from way back in 2001, and talks mainly about how the His Dark Materials trilogy has been received in the United States.

Philip Pullman's humanist tales of good and evil are a far cry from C. S. Lewis and A. A. Milne. But to the horror of the Religious Right they are a runaway hit.

Surging sales in the United States of books by Philip Pullman - whose The Amber Spyglass has been tipped to become the first 'children's novel' to win the Booker Prize - are subverting the influence of the Religious Right at the moment of its greatest political triumph.

With the sponsorship of the Bush administration, it has laid siege not only to American medicine, politics and academe - making Adam and Eve scientific fact in Kansas - it has also declared holy war on literature, targeting books written for young people. It has even sought to purge tales of witchcraft and magic from library shelves.

Against this tide of orthodoxy, Pullman's books - almost two million of them - have been selling like the fires sweeping the parched plains of the Bible Belt, a fact that gives him considerable satisfaction. In an interview with The Observer , Pullman, who lives in Oxford, said that the Right was striving to establish a hegemony which was 'orthodox, authoritarian doctrine'.

Published last autumn, The Amber Spyglass is the final book in the trilogy. His Dark Materials , which takes its name from Milton's Par adise Lost and also deals with Creation and the fall of man.

It has been described as the most dense and provocative of the three novels: in its 550 pages Pullman contrasts innocence and experience, good and evil. He redefines Mary as a fallen woman and Eve as the redeemer of men, and presents God as an ordinary angel before killing him. The plot is full of fairytale inventions, with witches, armoured bears, tiny spies who travel on dragonflies, and a 'subtle knife' which can be used to cut windows into parallel worlds.

His sales in America are more than just a literary phenomenon. They are a counter-cultural force. 'My experience of America is that it is a pretty conformist country, and that pressure on young people to go to some kind of church, often a fundamentalist one, can be formi dable,' said Pullman. But touring this land he attracts hundreds of devoted fans to every reading and talk he gives. Pullman says: 'Blake once wrote of Milton that he was a "true poet, and of the Devil's party, without knowing it". I am of the Devil's party, and I know it.'

Pullman's US editor, Joan Slatterly, said: 'We were braced for quite a lot of trouble.' But, says Pullman: 'In fact, I've had very little. The people who hate this kind of thing either didn't write to me or didn't read it.'

Not that Pullman has gone unchallenged, as readers' verdicts show. Amazon's Write Your Own Review noticeboards feature some 800 contributions posted for the first volume alone - The Golden Compass (published in Britain as Northern Lights ).

Some are by parents warning others to keep their children away, calling the books 'satanic' or 'dark and terrifying'. But considerably more come from rebellious readers in rural areas, aged from 11 to post-adolescence, many saying they were advised by parents or teachers not to read Pullman's work but ordered it by internet and were duly captivated. They are also intrigued by how his story views much of what they hear in Bible class through a different, vivid kaleidoscope.

'I'm just as interested in the Creation story as the fundamentalists are,' says Pullman, 'but in the part played by the tempter, who leads us to the kingdom of good and evil, which is wisdom, as an act of kindness towards those beings who had been kept as prisoners by the authority.'

The equation of the tempter with sexuality as self-awareness is as essential to Pullman's message as it is anathema to both the Religious Right and the canon of English children's books still idolised in America. It is a heresy in which Pullman delights as he dismisses the icons of that canon, C. S. Lewis - creator of the Narnia Chronicles - and A. A. Milne.

'I hate the Narnia books, and I hate them with deep and bitter passion, with their view of childhood as a golden age from which sexuality and adulthood are a falling away... I was looking at old copies of Punch , when it was infused by A. A. Milne's influence - all those beautifully drawn pictures of cutie little children that would never grow up, being sweetie little things to their mummies and daddies.'

At their core, Pullman's books are profoundly humanistic, says Slatterly - 'about love, seizing the day and being alive'. Pullman says: 'I find it so heartening to get a good response in America when all the signs are of a hegemony developing from the fundamentalist wing. It just shows there are people willing to explore and be more heterodox in their reading and thinking - that they need a bit of wonder and mystery, rather than orthodox, authoritarian doctrine.

'For all the qualities they have, mine are ordinary children who come to realise that the world is a wonderful place; whose destiny is not their birthright. There are no hereditary traditions or magic wands like in Harry Potter. There is the occult, but not in the sense I see in other books. I don't give people magical powers.'

At the end of the trilogy, love - 'the cause of it all,' says Pullman - is something that has to give way to inevitable solitude. But the compensation for loneliness is in life itself: 'The Kingdom of Heaven was over... we shouldn't live as though it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.'

Meanwhile, the Religious Right is politically rampant. Last weekend John Dilulio - entrusted by Bush to run his 'faith-based initiative', whereby social services would be run by religious charities - resigned. The Right had sabotaged his work - he had not been sufficiently orthodox.

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New production images from part two of the National Theatre

The last-minute flurry of christmas shopping has helped turn around an otherwise quiet December in Barrow town centre.

The book store, Ottakar

Some store keepers say they have been wringing their hands, not their tills, this month.

The popular gift shop run by the Barrow and District Society for the Blind, in Cavendish Street, is one of those which has suffered.

Manager Wilf Proctor said:

Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Philip Pullman continue their conversation about whether consumerism and the mass media have created a crisis of childhood.

The platform will be held at the National Theatre on March 15th.

His Dark Materials, the highly ambitious new stage production from director Nicholas Hytner, is currently preparing for its opening at the Royal National Theatre in London.

Based upon the novel by Philip Pullman, and adapted into two-parts by Nicholas Wright (Vincent in Brixton), His Dark Materials weaves a fantastical tale through worlds both known and unknown to the audience. Lead by a coming of age story for its two central characters, the audience is taken on a treachorous journey complete with encounters with creatures from parallel worlds, rebellious angels, soul-eating specters, armored bears, and a trip to Heaven to boot...

The cast, numbering over thirty, includes Samuel Barnett, John Carlisle, Niamh Cusack, Timothy Dalton, Patrick Godfrey, Stephen Greif, Patricia Hodge, Tim McMullan and Danny Sapani.

His Dark Materials is directed by Nicholas Hytner, with settings by Giles Cadle, costumes by Jon Morrell, lights by Paule Constable, and sound by Paul Groothuis.

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While it's become a clich

German author Cornelia Funke's new book, "Inkheart" (The Chicken House, 534 pages, $19.95) is one of the year's best, with the same vibrant inventiveness Funke displayed in "The Thief Lord."

Meggie, age 12, and her father Mo, a bookbinder, enjoy a companionable life with each other and their vast library, but that changes after a restive character named Dustfinger shows up one night when rain fell "like tiny fingers tapping on the windowpane."

Meggie isn't sure why she dislikes Dustfinger, but she instinctively understands that his reappearance from a terrible part of the family's past means that evil "had just slunk back in again" when he crosses the threshold.

From her reluctant father and the enigmatic Dustfinger (trustworthy? Or not?), she eventually winnows the story of his uneasy relationship to Dustfinger. Mo has the extraordinary and dangerous gift of reading aloud so convincingly that characters literally spring to life from a book's pages.

This talent disclosed itself nine years earlier, while Mo was reading the book "Inkheart" to his wife. Mo unwittingly brought to life both Dustfinger and a particularly malignant character named Capricorn, who suddenly appeared sprawling on the cottage floor. Just as abruptly, and just as unintentionally, his wife vanishes, presumably as a new character in "Inkheart."

Dustfinger has an ultimatum from Capricorn, who wants Mo to employ his gift again by reading a monster out of one of the remaining copies of "Inkheart." Mo's efforts to elude Capricorn eventually recruit Meggie's taciturn book-collecting aunt and the author of "Inkheart" himself.

"The Thief Lord," a novel with one foot in fantasy, was hugely popular with adults as well as children. Scholastic, the U.S. publisher of J.K. Rowlings' Harry Potter books, printed 75,000 hardcover copies of "The Thief Lord" - an unusual commitment when Scholastic usually publishes 10,000 copies of a new novel for young adults.

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The runaway success of the year for BBC Radio is "audio on demand". We launched the Radio Player in May last year and in its first month 1 million requests were received.

In November 2003 there were 5.5 million. It is one of the most innovative things the BBC has done - finding a new audience for radio and handing power to that audience to create their own BBC channel.

The 135,000 requests for the dramatisation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials showed that our audiences have seized the opportunity to listen to what they want when they want...

This was the year that digital radio took off. In January only 70,000 DAB sets had been sold; by December, around 350,000 sets have been sold and shops are unable to meet demand. All the high-street shops now know the difference between a digital radio and a radio with a digital clock. Even the big supermarkets have been selling them this Christmas and the big manufacturers like Roberts and Sony are at last moving into the market.

But it's not just digital radio sets that are making the difference. The radio industry has been astonished at the way people are listening to radio via their television sets. The success in particular of Freeview and the decision of the BBC and Emap to make our radio stations available on the platform has generated new listening and ensured our new digital services are available to millions, not just thousands. This year millions have accessed radio through the internet so the world of radio is changing and all of us who work in it must recognise and adapt to those changes.

This time last year we had just launched our fifth digital radio station in 12 months - BBC7 . A year on we have had our first audience figures. It's a positive beginning in a long game. Children have found BBC7 and are appreciating the joys of speech radio. The Asian network is reaching one in five Asians in the UK. And 1Xtra and 6 Music have broadcast live sessions with artists who would never have the opportunity to be heard in the analogue world. They are doing it week in, week out.

For our audiences it is the programmes we are delivering that really count. Jeremy Vine stepped into Radio 2 as though it were the place he was always meant to be. December sees the end of Jim Moir's remarkable tenure as controller of Radio 2.

Radio 1 too is set for change and renewal with a new breakfast show starting next month. Despite the intense competition, it still manages to reach half the nation's 15-24 year-olds with its mix of new and specialist music and speech programmes.

Radio 3 changed its schedule and enjoyed record summer audiences. The Last Night of the Proms at last came from all parts of the United Kingdom.

Radio 4, the Sony Radio Academy station of the year, has gone from strength to strength.

And if you want one brilliant moment for the year go to the Five Live website and hear Rob Andrew's scream over Ian Robertson's commentary as Jonny Wilkinson's kick went over. Wonderful!

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FOR CHILDREN

Midnight, by Jacqueline Wilson (Doubleday,

Philip Haigh, 19, from Yorkshire, who is serving a sentence for aggravated burglary, had read only car books and manuals before he was chosen for the Deerbolt study group.

(just a small note: This is only very slightly HDM related, it's mentioned once very subtlely)

In prison? Take it as read

BEDTIME stories didn

People talking on TV about books they admire? What could be better, asks Philip Pullman

The first thing to say, without any equivocation, is that I

The next thing is to point out how many of the critics who condemned the whole thing have missed the point. To rage with disapproval because Middlemarch wasn

its just a summarry of the Lyra's Oxford book really but its something :D

This captivating, slight, somewhat overpriced stocking-filler of a book has one outstanding merit for Philip Pullman's legion of readers. It answers, encouragingly, the question left hanging by the His Dark Materials trilogy. Having created, then parted, Lyra and Will - two of the most enticing heroes in children's or any literature - what more can Pullman do with them?

A future together for the children and their developing love seemed to be closed in the last volume of the trilogy, The Amber Spyglass. It was apparently debarred by the terms of the voluntary self-sacrifice needed to save their alternative Oxfords, and the multiple worlds around them. The ending brought thousands of readers aged between eight and 60 to tears.

If you delve among the inconsistencies and incomplete plot threads of The Amber Spyglass, you can find authentic grounds for a reprieve. Angels, we are told, can still move freely between worlds, and other routes exist. If this is permitted to angels, the highest (and bossiest) beings in the author's republican theology, why not to the children who have done more for the universe than any being? It can be argued that these radical rebel angels are behaving like true oligarchs, hoarding knowledge, resources and privileges for themselves. However, it is Pullman, inconsistent or otherwise, who is running the show. And curiously this gentle, agnostic liberal-humanist visionary is resolute in imposing on the children an ethic harder than his reviled Christian predecessor CS Lewis would have dared in the Narnia books.

He has promised further stories about aspects of the trilogy's characters. On paper, this sounds a dubious enterprise. Who wants to know more about the separate lives of Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, before the great dramas began? Lyra's Oxford shows it to be viable. The 49-page story is cut from the living wood of the author's imaginative world and comes instantly to life in its own right.

It opens with Lyra, two years older than in the trilogy, on the roof of Jordan College with Pantalaimon. She is now at school, but she bunks off that as she once did her college duties. Flying towards them, they see a thrush-type creature which is being attacked by other birds. It's a witch's daemon, and it brings a life-or-death appeal to them from the Arctic, the setting of the first Lyra novel, Northern Lights.

To say much more would be to mar the surprises of a brief tale. It introduces two new characters who clearly have legs for future adventures: the shrewd, friendly young scholar Dr Polstead, and the reputedly mad alchemist Sebastian Makepeace. There is a wound from the past: "Since she and Will had parted... the slightest thing had the power to move her to pity and distress; it felt as if her heart was bruised for ever".

The binding on my copy has not adequately stood up to use of the engraved fold-out map of Lyra's city as chronicled in the trilogy, with its Zeppelin station on Oxpens Road and steam trains at Oxford station. What I expect to remember longer is a new image from the story, of all the animate creatures of the city striving clumsily to protect this obdurate girl, in gratitude for what she has done for their universe.

It is one of those grand narrative strokes that Pullman can sometimes pull off with such casual-looking ease and faith. This book is that gift working in miniature.

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It has taken filmmakers almost a century to get J.M. Barrie

Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman (The Golden Compass), among others, have lately overseen a gratifying re-fertilization of the fallow soil of children

Phit made an amazing collage using the alethiometer image and several covert art images.

Click here to view it.