HisDarkMaterials.org

When the curtain rises on By placing the end of the books

Playbill.com just posted an article today informing us that His Dark Materials ws to be converted to the big screen by New Line Cinema. A bit late I'd say. Anyway, they posted this funny description along with it...

The fantasies center on a precocious child called Lyra Belacqua, or, at other times, Lyra Silvertongue. She lives around the grounds of Oxford's Jordan College, her ambitious parents busy elsewhere. The story features such mystical elements as Dust, a secret substance; creatures called "gyptians"; a knife that can slice its way into parallel worlds; a couple of rebels in the persons of Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter; and a device called an alethiometer, which divines the truth.

Here's one of those articles that doesn't go on about how great the Big Read or Lord of the Rings is, quite the opposite in fact...

It's a damn stupid question in the first place, "What's your favourite book?" When did anyone ever ask that of anyone else, in the course of regular social intercourse? It has no answer. There isn't a book so peerlessly good that it dwarfs all other books, unless you're prepared to say Ulysses and run the risk of getting glassed in the face.

So, really, it's not about books at all, it's about distinguishing yourself through your distinctions, choosing a work that gives the fullest picture of the person you'd like the world to consider you to be. That's why everyone always says Catch-22 - not because they think Heller to be easily as good as Roth, Mailer, Updike and Vonnegut rolled into one. No one thinks that. It's because of the myriad excellent messages enjoyment of this book gives off - I have a fine sense of humour; I'm anti-war and probably broadly leftwing; I have a healthy, questioning disrespect for authority; I like a bit of nooky, but not in a mean way, not like that Rabbit or that Zuckerman; and I'm highly intelligent, but I won't get all in your face about it. You probably want to go out with me, it says, and you're dead right.

Weirdly, though, when the nation was left to its own devices by the BBC's Big Read, it didn't say Catch-22. Well, it said it eventually, but only after it had gone through all the children's books it had ever heard of. The Lord of the Rings came first and Pride and Prejudice came second, followed by His Dark Materials, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

There was a bit of a scramble between The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Winnie the Pooh, until the nation said: "Sod it, let's have them both! You can never have too much vintage children's literature." You're probably thinking: "Stop! Stop! Jane Austen isn't a children's writer. Sure, she produced some juvenilia, but even that was of a highly sophisticated nature." In theory, you're right, but once something's been on telly, new rules apply, of which more in a minute.

Now, this is emphatically not a nation you'd want to go out with. This nation is relentlessly childish and dresses 15 years too young for its age; if it has a sense of humour at all, it's one of those terribly whimsical ones that isn't funny, or it's only interested in fart jokes.

I am not of the school that says children's books are automatically less sophisticated than adult ones. Many, many books of the chick lit variety are at exactly the same level of linguistic nuance and complication as Harry Potter, and substantially below that of His Dark Materials. But the question remains: why weren't these people embarrassed? They'd be ashamed to suck a dummy walking down the street or to order off a kids' menu. Why aren't they ashamed that the fictional world into which they dive 35th most pleasurably is the one in which there's this really poor kid, right, and he wins a trip round this chocolate factory and all these amazing adventures happen?

The bulk of non-children's books in the top 100 are the ones that have been made into a film or mini-series. It is a well-known fact that no one's actually read Gone With the Wind since celluloid was invented. Or Rebecca, or Little Women, and although they have read Pride and Prejudice, only a mental picture of Colin Firth stops them getting it mixed up with that other one about all the excitable siblings.

The natural conclusion of all these choices is that books are like horses - very handy in their day, but superseded by the technology of the camera/engine, and now their only function is as nostalgic weekend hobbies. That's why people never turn films into books, it would be like downloading your iPod on to an eight-track. And again, why no toxic shame? Why not even the hint of sheepishness in the admission that reading is a little bit tiring compared with sitting and gawping at something?

It's because there's nothing more embarrassing in this cultural landscape than sounding like you think you're an intellectual. This crime is so shameful that there aren't even words to describe it, apart from "pretentious" and "ponce" - the second functioning as so many different and unconnected insults that it's basically unusable.

The appreciation of highbrow literature is seen as synonymous with self-regard, so that a love of the lowbrow is less embarrassing; walking through Trafalgar Square naked singing Chris de Burgh would be less embarrassing. And nothing vents this anti-intellectualism like this kind of questionnaire, which forces the issue so finally, with the open threat of parading about whatever information you give it.

The Big Read pretended to be a celebration of literature, but it's actually a celebration of the kind of curtain-twitching Englishness that makes literature think it's too good for the likes of us, and it should go and live in France.

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Television can sell us almost anything. When Delia Smith recommended cranberries in a cookery programme, they sold out up and down the country. She achieved much the same for a lemon zester, Maldon sea salt, an omelette pan, a brand of flour and prunes.

The one defence that can be made of The Big Read is that it has boosted reading. Never mind that the programmes have been nothing less than "car-crash TV", as one book-trade commentator put it. Anything at all that gets more people reading is good, isn't it?

No, it is not. It is possible to make programmes promoting books that are so demeaning they do more harm than good. Far from easy, but possible - and The Big Read has pulled off this amazing feat of debasement.

In any case, it turns out that it is not reading that The Big Read has primarily promoted but watching: yet more watching. According to the online booksellers Amazon, sales of DVDs and videos of the featured titles have increased far more than sales of the books. Sales of the book of Catch-22 went up by 24 per cent, sales of the 1970 film by 1,500 per cent. Sales of Captain Corelli's Mandolin went up 155 per cent, sales of the movie by 1,533 per cent.

Why be surprised? The audience for The Big Read naturally consisted of people who preferred watching to reading, and it was obvious at every stage of the proceedings that votes were being cast for films and TV adaptations rather than for the texts themselves. In Saturday's grotesque "grand finale" from the Royal Opera House, the "celebrity advocate" for Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, the tall explorer Benedict Allen actually called the work "deeply disadvantaged" because it has not yet been filmed.

Throughout, the written word has actually been shunned, while supposedly being celebrated. Instead of readings, viewers have been subjected to dismal dramatisations, some involving the celebrity pretending to be a character in the book. So we not only got Colin Firth as Mr Darcy, but Meera Syal camping it up as an Austen heroine.

JD Salinger, a great purist in his way, has never allowed The Catcher in the Rye to be filmed, or even to be published with a picture cover. So arrogant were the producers of The Big Read, so certain that they were conferring prestige, that they just went ahead and dramatised it anyway, without permission, arguing afterwards that they were merely "quoting" it for the purposes of review. That they failed to see the distinction tells all.

On Saturday, while the votes were being counted, that prize ass Clive Anderson breezily remarked: "We haven't been able to hear too many of the actual words." What followed, however, was yet another garbled mish-mash of pur

Murder, ghost stories and lost souls: Britain's renowned stages and shops turn to Dark Materials and modern art for seasonal inspiration

It's Christmas, season of bloody murder, betrayal of innocence, lost souls in anguish, and festive towers of plaster casts of fridge freezers. Throw another orphan on the fire and pull up a coffin.

In many places, it's less the season of good cheer and more bleak midwinter this Christmas, including two of the renowned stages and some of the most famous shop windows in the country. One observer blames the Puritans for the lingering distrust of tinsel.

At Covent Garden, Elaine Padmore, director of opera, expressed real shock at the idea of any children coming to the Royal Opera House's Christmas show, Sweeney Todd. "Oh, no! I do think this is more a treat for the adults."

When asked if the national would ever consider a tinsel and robins Christmas show, Nicholas Hytner, director of the National Theatre, said frostily: "The National Theatre isn't a church and Christmas is none of our business."

In the drizzle outside Selfridges, one woman stared in bafflement at contemporary artist Thomas Rentmeister's pile of ghostly freezers. "Looks like the January sales," she sighed."Glad I didn't bring the kids."

At the Society of Antiquaries, by the light of the real candles burning on their real Christmas tree (readers, don't try this at home) secretary Dai Morgan Evans blames Henry VIII, and David Starkey as his publicist, for the amount of bah humbuggery around this Christmas.

"It's the Puritans, you see, that's where all this suspicion of Christmas comes from. The country has never really recovered from it. The Puritans banned Christmas, but I blame Henry. I'm sorry to say this of a Tudor and fellow Welshman, but if he hadn't reformed the English church to get his own way, he wouldn't have let the Puritans in the door."

The Selfridges windows, designed by young contemporary artists, were curated by Art Review magazine staff, who claim that more people will see their Christmas exhibition than visit Tate Modern in a year.

Art Review insists, hurt, that they are not Puritans and that their windows are jolly. They are all on the theme of feasting. Anya Gallaccio, shortlisted for this year's Turner Prize, has filled glittering display cases with bronze casts of sweet potatoes sprouting as if the chiller drawer had been taken over by aliens from outer space.

The most sinister show in town is probably at the Savoy, where an eerily youthful male steals little children from their mothers and carries them off to his fantasy island - but then somebody always does a production of Peter Pan at Christmas.

Covent Garden and the National Theatre, however, will come close this year in the flesh creeping stakes.

Covent Garden does not traditionally do a Christmas show. "We leave that to the ballet, who always do us proud in a glittering family show," Ms Padmore said.

This is the opera company's first Christmas show, and first contemporary musical. Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd has most of the ingredients of traditional pan tomime: Victorian frocks, big song and dance numbers, bustling street scenes, endearing juvenile leads - except the pretty innocents end with their throats cut, minced up into Mrs Lovett's delicious pies.

Elaine Padmore insists she is no Grinch: she spent years working in Ireland, for Wexford Opera and the Dublin Grand Opera Society, and admits she still yearns for the Christmas windows of Dublin's resolutely traditional Grafton Street.

"We didn't choose to do this show as a Christmas show, that's just how it has turned out. But I do think you could de fend it as a Christmas show, it fits very nicely into that good old Victorian tradition of sitting around a roaring fire and chilling your blood with ghost stories."

At the National Theatre Nicholas Hytner says: "The winter holidays are a good time for going to the theatre; and family audiences in particular like seeing a show at this time of the year."

However, he must have moments when he wishes he'd gone for Jack and the Beanstalk, with nothing to worry about except the cow getting its hind and front legs in step.

The national's current epic production - two full length plays adapted from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials - is technically one of the most complicated shows it has ever attempted.

It is now certainly not a Christmas show: hideous technical hitches last week led to the abandonment of two previews, and postponing the press night until January.

The books are some of the darkest fantasies ever written for children, where one false move may lead not only to getting lost in the dark forest, but in the howling wastelands of a parallel universe.

Nicholas Hytner says he cannot envisage doing a Cinderella or a Treasure Island. He has wanted to stage the Dark Materials books since he first read them, and the National has been working on this production for almost two years.

He says: "There's no need any more to raid the library for the stories our grandparents and great-grandparents loved. There's a new generation of children's writers who treat their readers seriously; we want to do the same with our audiences."

It all sounds a bit bleak to Dai Morgan Evans at the Society of Antiquaries, who fears his good cheer is out of fashion.

"Christmas may have been re-instated, but the legacy of Puritanism remains, in a feeling that there's something a bit medieval about celebrating it too heartily."

The society is just shy of 300 years old, one of the oldest antiquarian societies in the world. Their annual party is assumed to be an ancient traditions. But in fact, Mr Morgan Evans invented it in 1993.

"It takes the Celts to show the English how to do jolly - just look at how the two countries play rugby. Not allowed have proper Celtic severed heads hanging up as decorations though. If you're serving sandwiches the health and safety chaps don't like all that dripping blood around the place."

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A bumper crop of kids' shows

A Sports promoter would bill it as a seasonal prizefight between theatrical tag-teams. In the blue corner, the fairytale champions of the Christmas family show: Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella. In the well-read corner, the young challengers, representing contemporary children

Though the trend can only be good news for writers such as David Almond, he believes the classics have plenty of life in them yet.

J.R.R. Tolkien

The significance of Pullman

The result surprised no-one, least of all Ladbrokes, which closed all bets on the project two months ago, claiming it had become something of a one-horse race.

But the climax to the BBC2 series The Big Read - the moment when JRR Tolkien

The Lord Of The Rings has regularly topped similar polls and interest in the dark tales of Middle Earth has surged in the wake of Peter Jackson

Colin Firth in wet underpants was no match for Peter Jackson's hulking cyber-monsters. Or, as the BBC put it officially, Lord of the Rings beat Pride and Prejudice for the title of "best loved novel of all time" in the corporation's Big Read contest.

In a final dominated by titles whose profiles were raised by recent film or television tie-ins, a poll totalling half a million people at the weekend voted Tolkien's epic trilogy of struggle above Jane Austen's comedy of love and manners.

The poll - the biggest single test of public reading taste yet - put only one other pre-20th century novel, Charlotte Bront

Only four of the top 20 have not been filmed or televised. Of this minority, two have films in the pipeline. They are Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which reached an unexpectedly high third place although it has been fully published for only three years, and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which came fifth.

The two novels which have not yet attracted film or TV interest are Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong, in 13th place, and Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, 15th.

Bookmakers closed betting on the contest in October, after suspicions of an organised voting lobby for Lord of the Rings, which has also been propelled by Peter Jackson's three hyped films within two years.

Tolkien devised the story, after fighting at the battle of the Somme, as "a myth for England", to honour the courage and obstinacy of a small people against evil.

He wanted it to be a counterpart to the Finnish national myth, the Kalevala, which he had loved as a philology student.

In 1969, shortly before he died, he sold the film rights for $250,000 (the equivalent now to

Britain's favourite book was last night declared to be The Lord of the Rings, by J R R Tolkien, after it won the BBC's Big Read contest.

The fantasy epic, which has dominated the contest since voting began seven weeks ago, beat an eclectic mix of 20 other titles to take 174,000 votes and the top prize in a ceremony broadcast from the Royal Opera House.

In all, 750,000 votes were cast after well-known broadcasters such as Meera Syal, Ruby Wax and John Humphrys had argued the case for their choices on a shortlist of 21.

Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, had to be content with second place, despite a last-minute surge in support. It won 135,000 votes. His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman, was third with 63,000.

The other two novels in the top five were The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams (57,000), and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by J K Rowling (55,000).

Behind them in the top 10 were To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell; Winnie the Pooh by A A Milne; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C S Lewis, and Catch 22 by Joseph Heller.

The BBC competition has boosted the sales and library loans of the titles shortlisted. Interim figures from several library authorities have shown demand for the books soaring by more than 50 per cent. Over the past two months, the titles are reported to have sold more than 440,000 copies between them.

Andrew Davies, the Bafta-winning dramatist who wrote a highly successful adaptation of Pride and Prejudice for BBC in 1995 and who took part in last night's programme, said that he still found the Austen novel far superior to the Tolkien trilogy.

He thought that a contest between such vastly different books was "deeply silly". But he added: "Having said that, I did find myself being drawn into the competition."

He felt that the contest had "got a lot of people excited" about reading.

He added: "I don't think you can draw any pompous conclusions about the taste of the nation from the competition because I think fans of Jane Austen and George Eliot are more prim about voting. Fans of books such as The Lord of the Rings, which have cult status, also tend to cast more than one vote."

After the show, the winning author's grandson, Simon Tolkien, said his grandfather had dreaded the book's launch in 1954, saying: "I've exposed my heart to be shot at."

[© The Telegraph, 14/12/03]

Now that "The Lord of the Rings" has proven it can be done, now that we know that a three-part, nine-hour plunge into a multilayered fantasy world dreamed up by a onetime Oxford academic can become not just box office manna but also an International Cultural Happening -- and now that this Happening is poised to culminate with New Line Cinema's release, this Wednesday, of "Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" -- it's time to ask the inevitable question: When's the next epic three-part fantasy dreamed up by a onetime Oxford academic going to hit the big screen? The answer: maybe in 2005, more likely in 2006.

The heir apparent is Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy. It's not the catchiest title, perhaps -- most readers are more familiar with the books' individual titles, especially "The Golden Compass" -- but it shows how high the author has set his sights: He borrowed it from Milton's "Paradise Lost." And although Pullman fans will tell you that their man's work is entirely original and un-Tolkienesque, one of the things he clearly shares with the creator of Middle-earth is ambition.

Executives at New Line and Scholastic Entertainment, who joined forces last year on the Pullman project, have plenty of ambition, too, though they're careful to play down the "Rings" comparison.

"I want to make it clear that we're not expecting the first movie to gross $860 million worldwide," says Mark Ordesky, executive vice president and chief operating officer of New Line Productions, who watched in astonishment as his company's first Tolkien adaptation did just that. To tag "His Dark Materials" as "Lord of the Rings" revisited would be a disservice to Pullman, he says. It's the kind of thing only some "Hollywood huckster" would do.

But he does think the project has potential, right?

"It has huge potential," Ordesky says.

As for Pullman, he is keeping his distance from the film version of his work. He turned down an offer to write the screenplay -- the job went to celebrated playwright Tom Stoppard -- because after spending seven years writing the 1,300-page trilogy, "the last thing I want to do is take it apart and put it together again," he says. Still, he's happy to talk to the adapters when they seek his advice, and he was pleased to hear that the New Line people were involved. He's not much of a Tolkien fan, but he admired what they did with the first "Rings" film.

Besides -- and here a hint of laughter slips into his voice -- "they're used to telling stories in three parts."

Philip Pullman makes his home a couple of miles outside Oxford, where he taught in a middle school and then in a teacher-training college for many years. He moved out of the city after grinning fans began showing up at his door with stacks of books for him to sign. There are 6.5 million copies of "The Golden Compass," "The Subtle Knife" and "The Amber Spyglass" in print, not counting those translated into 37 foreign languages. Earlier this year, the trilogy was broadcast as a BBC radio play, and Britain's prestigious National Theatre will soon premiere a two-part, six-hour adaptation. Meanwhile, "Lyra's Oxford," a slim stocking-stuffer that serves as a tantalizing postscript to the trilogy, has been appearing on British bestseller lists.

All this because, a decade or so ago, Pullman had a vision of a 12-year-old girl overhearing some grown-up talk she wasn't meant to hear.

Lyra Belacqua -- half-wild, fearless and endlessly resourceful -- is one of the most compelling pre-adolescents in English literature. Known also as Lyra Silvertongue for her ability to spin mesmerizing falsehoods, she inhabits a world that appears to overlap with ours while being distinct in disorienting ways. She's a bit like a female version of Kipling's Anglo Indian charmer Kim, though Pullman thinks she derives in part from pen-and-ink drawings of a French girl in a story he read as a boy: "a tough-looking character wearing a big black leather jacket and a short skirt." Wherever she came from, she makes Frodo Baggins seem a dull plodder indeed.

The talk Lyra overhears among the scholars at Oxford's Jordan College, where she has been running free in the absence of her ambitious parents, involves a mysterious substance called Dust. Associated somehow with the Aurora Borealis, it is linked as well to the transition from childhood to adulthood, and the study of it appears to threaten the authority of the all-powerful established church. Before either Lyra or the reader can begin to figure all this out, however, one of her friends is kidnapped, and she finds herself headed for the Arctic, along with a band of fen-dwelling "gyptians," to rescue him and other missing children. Along the way, she learns to read a rare, truth-telling instrument called an alethiometer and acquires a new identity: a girl with a preordained mission, a child about whom "the witches have talked . . . for centuries past."

The richness of the story that Pullman created around his initial vision is, like any fully realized alternative universe, impossible to convey by simply listing characters and plot elements. One of his most striking inventions -- "the best idea I've ever had, really," he says -- is the notion that humans in Lyra's world are accompanied everywhere by "daemons," individual soul mates in animal form without whom they are not whole. At first, he wasn't sure the idea would work; if daemons came off as "talking pets," they'd only clutter up the story. Then he saw that he could use his characters' relationships with their daemons to bring psychological insights to life.

Psychology is far from the only complex or "grown-up" element Pullman layers into his tale. You don't have to probe very deeply to see that he is, among other things, reworking John Milton's epic about a cataclysmic war in Heaven while at the same time reimagining the temptation of Eve. Pullman is famously cranky about being pigeonholed as a children's author -- "His Dark Materials" has been marketed both to kids and to adults -- and it is obvious that he's not afraid to challenge younger readers. But his imagery is so vivid, his prose so clean and his storytelling so breathtakingly paced that there's no need to grapple with the Big Ideas to love his work.

All of this appeals to would-be filmmakers as well. And why not? Who wouldn't be attracted to a thrilling adventure story stocked with wonderfully drawn scenes, heart-tugging characters and a spicy stew of intellectual themes to be digested or not, as the audience desires? Especially when you throw in the cosmic rebel Lord Asriel and his lethal paramour, Mrs. Coulter. And a knife that cuts through air to reveal parallel worlds. And 12-year-old Will Parry, a male lead almost as compelling as Lyra, whom she meets in the second book. And. . . .

Just think about the visuals here . . .

An armored bear.

"If you had asked me what totally sold me on making this movie," says New Line Productions President Toby Emmerich, "it was two words: Iorek Byrnison."

Emmerich, who's on the phone from Southern California, doesn't have much time to think about "His Dark Materials" these days. He has just flown back from Wellington, New Zealand, where 100,000 people hit the streets to celebrate the world premiere of "The Return of the King," and like his colleague, Ordesky, he worries about the expectations a hasty comparison might raise. Trying to replicate the Tolkien phenomenon would be "a fool's errand," he says.

Still, he has fallen in love with Iorek, whom he calls "an insanely awesome character."

Pullman, who readily acknowledges his many borrowings, says this particular beast came straight out of his own imagination. "It was the phrase first, 'the armored bear,' " he says and then he had to make something of it. Helped along by polar lore gleaned from "Arctic Dreams," a "wonderful, wonderful" nonfiction book by Barry Lopez, he came up with the notion of great white bears with superior metal-working skills who fight in armor, like ursine knights, and of one such creature in particular, the deposed bear king Iorek Byrnison. Iorek bounds onstage halfway through "The Golden Compass" -- that's him on the cover of the best-known American edition, with Lyra on his back -- and by sheer force of personality achieves instant star billing. In the films, his creator likes to imagine, he'll have the voice of James Earl Jones.

When those films are made, they will owe their existence in no small part to Deborah Forte, the president of Scholastic Entertainment, who read "The Golden Compass" in manuscript form (it was published in the U.K. as "Northern Lights" in 1995) and promptly went after the movie rights. "I said, wherever this book is going, I want to go with it," recalls Forte, who is to produce the film project. She had a moment of wanting to make a movie right away, but after the second volume appeared, she knew she had to wait to see where the story was going. New Line sought her out after "The Amber Spyglass" won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in 2001, and together they agreed to ask Stoppard to write an initial screenplay.

"I thought he had the most wonderful imagination," Stoppard says of his reaction to reading Pullman, which he did before agreeing to take on the adaptation. The trilogy's narrative architecture gave him some trouble, as might be expected with what he calls "a wild toboggan ride" of a story in which time is a bit elastic. But he found Pullman generous and "not at all defensive" when consulted, which made him less nervous about making the necessary changes.

Stoppard has completed a screenplay based on "The Golden Compass" -- it took three drafts, he says, and he was asked to lose some of the theoretical physics behind Pullman's concept of parallel universes, which he'd found fascinating -- and has started on a treatment of the next two books. Among other changes, he brings Will into the story at the end of the first film and he introduces a major villain, Father MacPhail, much earlier than Pullman did.

Does he have a favorite scene?

"I personally love the first time Iorek and Lyra meet," Stoppard says, explaining how the camera will draw viewers toward the conjunction of girl and bear. In his mind, it's a movie poster.

New Line's Emmerich isn't thinking posters yet, however. He says he's happy with Stoppard's work, but "I would be really shocked if a director said, 'Yup, I want to shoot this screenplay as is.' I've never seen it happen." He and Forte have done "a global list" of directors, but neither will say where the hiring process stands. They don't know yet whether "His Dark Materials" will end up as two movies or three, though Emmerich says the most likely scenario would be to shoot the first one and then, assuming it succeeds, shoot a second and third film simultaneously. As for those "Lord of the Rings" comparisons, he offers one more thought that might be a bit alarming to the Pullman faithful.

Unlike Tolkien's trilogy, Emmerich points out, Pullman's books haven't been around long enough to become classics, and his fan base isn't so big that New Line has to worry about offending it. That gives us "much more license to turn them into movies," he says.

And what of the hopes and fears of the fans themselves? One Pullman Internet site at least, DarkMaterials.com, appears to have a realistic take on their situation. An entry under the heading of "Grossly Distorted Rumors" reads: "New Line Cinema deeply cares about your opinions on the director/casting/plot/ending of the movies." The sad truth: "They don't."

Not that this stops the chatter, of course. Fans play the casting game (as Mrs. Coulter, Nicole Kidman! Catherine Zeta-Jones!). They speculate about 16-year-olds playing Will and Lyra, wrecking Pullman's innocence-to-experience motif. They follow every gossipy hint in the director sweepstakes as names such as Sam Mendes and Brett Ratner get tossed around.

Brett Ratner?

"Oh my God," wrote a 29-year-old blogger named Mimi Nguyen in response to this one. "Brett Ratner is the director of 'Rush Hour,' people. The director of 'Rush Hour' cannot possibly begin to comprehend what is necessary for 'His Dark Materials' to transition to the screen."

Nguyen is a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. She admires Pullman for many reasons, not least because, instead of condemning Eve as a sinner, he turns her into "the 'mother' of consciousness, creativity and intellectual possibility." She worries that Hollywood will strip away the books' dark edges, eliminate their harsh critique of organized religion and turn a morally complex universe into "adventure films for kids."

Pullman worries some, too. Changing Lyra's age would be a big mistake, he agrees, and he confesses to wondering how the filmmakers will deal with his religious themes. He's also concerned that Lyra's relationships might be sentimentalized: "There's a ferocity there that's absolutely vital," he says.

Still, he doesn't worry all that much. He thinks he may have something as big or bigger than "His Dark Materials" still to write, and getting too engaged with the film would be a distraction. If the script were "a coarse and unsubtle piece of work," he'd be alarmed, but that won't happen with Stoppard on the case. Also problematic would be a director who cared only about "shoot-'em-up action movies." But Pullman has faith, he says, that New Line and Scholastic will "do the right thing."

What scenes, then, does he look forward to seeing on film?

Pullman cites a couple of favorites from "The Amber Spyglass"; they're best left unmentioned, for fear of spoiling the ending. Then the creator of Iorek Byrnison throws out one more.

"I also really like," he says, "the meeting between Will and the armored bear."

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Apparently some visitors of this site still do not know His Dark Materials. Unfortunately, HDM is no story that can be summed up in a few words without spoiling the many surprises Philip Pullman has built into the story.

However, the following short introduction should give new readers an idea of what to expect and why to buy the books at once.

Basically the first book is the story of a little girl, Lyra, having lost both her parents in a zeppelin crash and living in Oxford, Brytain at Jordan College, the Master of Jordan being kind of her godfather. Well, the story is kicked off the moment when children of poor people start disappearing all over Brytain. One day Lyra's best friend, the kitchen boy Roger is kidnapped, too.

Lyra and her d

The Sunday Times reports that:

"Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer prize-winning artist, discusses his work with novelist Philip Pullman, at the ICA, The Mall, SW1, December 18, 6.45pm,

JRR Tolkien's epic fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings has won the BBC's Big Read contest to find the UK's most popular novel beating Pride and Prejudice, His Dark Materials, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

With 23% of the public's vote or 174 thousand votes, LotR was a clear winner with 39 thousand more votes than second-placed Pride and Prejudice and more than His Dark Materials, The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Harry Potter combined.

Phone votes were cast up to and during the BBC Two show and Tolkien's triumph was announced live from the Royal Opera House in a program presented by Clive Anderson.

Bookmakers Ladbrokes had closed bets in October because The Lord of the Rings had become the only real contender in "a one horse race."

A spokesman from Ladbrokes said:

"Tolkien fans are amongst the best organized group of supporters on the internet and for two days, our website was under siege. Nobody wanted to back anybody other than Tolkien, we couldn't continue betting on a one horse race and were forced to close the book and take the losses on the chin."

Book-selling internet site Amazon.co.uk reported the project - which originally shortlisted 100 novels - boosted sales of some books by nearly 500% after the list was announced on October 18th.

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