HisDarkMaterials.org

The Lord of the Rings is the only real contender in "a one horse race" to win the BBC's Big Read contest, according to bookmaker Ladbrokes.

Ladbrokes has closed betting because, in the last week, the only money laid has been for the JRR Tolkien classic to win the competition's public vote.

But the BBC said the competition was far from over and viewers should vote to "make a difference".

The contest lets viewers vote for their favourite from a list of 21 novels.

A Ladbrokes spokesman said: "Nobody wants to back anybody other than Tolkien - even the Harry Potter money has dried up.

FINAL BIG READ ODDS
1/3 - The Lord of the Rings
5/1 - Pride and Prejudice
5/1 - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
10/1 - Great Expectations
10/1 - Rebecca
Source: Ladbrokes

"We cannot continue betting on a one horse race. We will open the market again if we believe that The Big Read is a contest."

When the shortlist of 21 was first announced, there were a range of bets on The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Pride and Prejudice, he said.

But since then, Tolkien has become the "red-hot odds-on favourite" and other bets dried up.

The hype surrounding the final Lord of the Rings film, due to be released on 17 December, could also influence voting, the Ladbrokes spokesman said.

The Big Read winner will be revealed on 13 December, after seven weeks of television pleas by celebrities to win votes for their favourite book.

BBC statement: The contest is far from over, with titles moving around the leaderboard day-by-day

In a statement, the BBC said the race to find Britain's favourite book had "only just begun" and thousands of votes for titles across top 21 were flooding in. "Only three books have been championed on television up until now and the contest is far from over, with titles moving around the leaderboard day-by-day," it said.

"We would urge viewers to vote for their favourite and make a difference."

On BBC Two on Saturday, Ruby Wax will put the case for Catcher in the Rye, Phill Jupitus for Winnie the Pooh and Clare Short for Captain Corelli's Mandolin.

The contest has come in for criticism from some authors, with Andrew O'Hagan accusing it of being "anti-literary" and Adam Mars-Jones calling the show "obscene".

[BBC, 31/10/03]

As actors rehearse an adaptation of 'His Dark Materials', its author tells Adi Bloom of the value of theatre in education.

Towards the end of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, a weary, decrepit God cowers in fear of his life, tears streaming down his face in terror.

Two children tower above him, their love for one another defying the malevolent wrath of organised religion.

This is hardly the usual stuff of Christmas drama. But in December a two-part adaptation of the trilogy will begin at the National Theatre. It is a radical departure from the venue's recent run of lavish Christmas musicals, which never demanded too much from their festive-season audiences.

But Philip Pullman believes audiences will respond well to the challenge.

"My readers are very sensible people. They're the cream of the crop," he said. "They are capable of responding vividly and passionately."

And Nicholas Hytner, who took over as director of the National in April, sees it as his role to question convention. "There's always a hunger for large theatrical epics," he said. "But old Victorian and Edwardian classics have had their day. I want to make theatre for kids, not adaptations of their grandparents' stories."

The anti-establishment fury of His Dark Materials, he believes, perfectly fills this brief: "Sure, it's anti-clerical, but it is full of spiritual yearnings. It's a hugely ambitious attempt to create a new mythology for a generation not served by organised religion."

The Mail on Sunday once described Mr Pullman as the most dangerous author in Britain. Mr Hytner is dismissive of the media hysteria surrounding the novels. Contemporary audiences, he says, can handle occasional on-stage heresy. But he and his cast do fear other, different cries of heresy.

Children are notoriously territorial about novels that they love, and necessary adaptations and omissions could alienate the target audience.

"There's concern that teenagers will be sitting there with arms crossed, saying it's crap," he said. "When you fail, it's miserable."

But actress Patricia Hodge, who will play villainess Mrs Coulter, says such fears are inevitable with any theatre adaptation.

"Even if you do Hamlet, you're up for comparison," she said. "The audience have to understand that this isn't the book. This is something else. It's Philip Pullman's ideas and theories put on to the stage.

"You can't portray what's in somebody's mind. But you invest in the characters. Hopefully any omissions will make the whole moral, philosophical and religious debate going on at the heart of the story far more colourful and immediate."

Talk like this is enough to give most authors palpitations. But Mr Pullman has been notably sanguine about the public carving-up of his most famous work. He sees the theatre production as a critical test of his own abilities as a writer. If the central story is strong, it will stand up to telling through an alternative medium.

"I'm a book person. They're theatre people," he said. "I think the best thing for me to do is keep out of the way and make encouraging noises." The presentation of the familiar in unfamiliar form might also encourage children to experiment further with the theatre. "The theatre gives children another language, another mode of expression. It's a collective experience. We join in, we laugh, we clap, we cry. We're part of a total emotional link," he said.

But, he believes, pressure to meet government targets has meant that heads are reluctant to allow pupils to capitalise on this experience, by organising theatre trips and workshops.

"You're constantly having to struggle against the perceptions of some people in education, who think theatre is a luxury. They think it takes time away from tests and other important things, letting results slip. It's such a morally and emotionally poverty-stricken way of looking at education."

His Dark Materials previews at the National Theatre from December 4. Box office: tel 020 7452 3000.

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No one believed that Philip Pullman's modern children's classic His Dark Materials could work on the stage. But after meeting director Nicholas Hytner, the actors, and key backstage staff, Kate Kellaway firmly believes that the National is on to a winner .

Nicholas Hytner knew, within a week of taking over from Trevor Nunn as artistic director at the National Theatre, that he was looking for an epic. It would be his dare to himself: in an age where small is beautiful and short is sweet, he felt there was a 'hunger' for the opposite experience - a metaphysical adventure that would consume hours, overtake nights or steal an entire day - and pull in children and adults alike. He intuited that there must be something out there to satisfy that hunger before knowing what it was.

Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials, is that epic. It is a thrilling moral odyssey with two children as its stars. It explores the possibility of parallel universes and introduces a cast of monsters to rival any from ancient mythology. The National, thanks to the enthusiasm of its literary manager Jack Bradley, was on to it long before The Amber Spyglass won the Whitbread Prize in 2002. Hytner has been in its thrall ever since he read it - and his production has been a year and a half in the making. Now, at last, 30 or more actors are almost ready. And the two plays - six hours in total - will open in December.

Hytner does not need to explain that this is a high-risk project. I say it for him: how can he stage successfully a work of this scale and complexity? In Pullman's trilogy, each child has a 'daemon', an ever-changing attendant beast who reflects its owner's mood and circumstance: owl, ermine, arctic fox... How do you stage animal mutability? How do you cut through from one world to another with a knife? How do you present harpies, angels, armoured bears? How do you look in on the Land of the Dead? Or show the audience mythological dust? You'd have to set yourself up as a kind of God/ director (an ironic state of affairs, for God gets no credit in Pullman's passionately atheistic worlds). It is easier to see the books working as cinema - and a film is in the pipeline, with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard.

Hytner parries instantly. For a start, he does not think the books are a natural subject for film. 'By its very nature, film will be obliged to fill in all the gaps and leave nothing to the imagination.' Theatre is more like reading itself. It can offer a 'different but equivalent imaginative conspiracy' with its audience. Not that Hytner can be complacent about readers. He knows he is unlikely to please all the trilogy's obsessional devotees - especially the teenage literary boffins who know every detail of Pullman's landscapes better than their own back gardens.

If it comes off - and even if it doesn't - Hytner's decision to stage Pullman is canny. These are books, although fantastical, that are of their time, and the National ideally ought to have some sense of the Zeitgeist. Pullman is the most successful author, after J.K. Rowling, of what publishers like to call 'crossover novels' - those written for children but read by adults too. This may sound like a flip category but Pullman's books are in the deepest sense crossover books, exploring transition, looking at innocence and experience, conscious of all that may be lost once childhood goes - the dust (his greatest idea) that brings on an empty maturity.

On train and bus, I see J.K. Rowling's fans Pottering about - but as often glimpse the spines of Pullman's books. And now they are being joined by a score of others too, first-rate 'crossover' authors such as Mark Haddon, David Almond, Cornelia Funke. I find nevertheless the crossover novel a peculiar term; it seems to imply that there is, between childhood and adulthood, a kind of Checkpoint Charlie (all those failing to obey the midnight curfew turn into pumpkins). Adam Phillips, the critic and pychoanalyst, suggests that childhood does resemble for some adults a 'foreign country' which they revisit through children's books, hoping to find they still speak the language. He is fascinated by the reasons adults elect to read children's books. He thinks we idealise authors who achieve what we don't have ourselves, an 'immaculate communication' with children. These authors, he adds, may have their own version of this fantasy and hope, through their writing, to become a 'spellbinding parent who can entrance the child'. Such authors have become 'cultural icons', he adds. (No wonder Madonna is trying to get on the bandwagon.)

Hytner does not reject the 'crossover' novel as a category; he seems to entertain a brisk nostalgia for adolescence, saying: 'I genuinely believe teenagers ask the big questions that we have no time to ask for most of the rest of our lives.' He thinks that what makes the Pullman trilogy so 'exciting and specifically teenage is the ferment of big, metaphysical ideas'. He loves the way that 'narrative excitement in the books is matched by intellectual excitement'. He hastens through a list: 'Why are we here? Is there a God? If so, why is he so indifferent to our welfare? What constitutes a moral act? And does the end justify the means - all the big questions are there.'

Michael Morpurgo, children's laureate, does not care for the 'crossover' tag (although he may find his new book Private Peaceful qualifying). He believes that fantasy writing such as Pullman's is becoming ever more popular. The reasons are obvious, he says: 'The world is complex and we don't want to be in it all the time.' The 'real' world is too relentlessly temporal for escapist adult readers, too great a respecter of age and of a chronological journey through a life.

Jamila Gavin who, like Pullman, won the Whitbread for her outstanding novel Coram Boy (and whose new book, The Blood Stone, is just out) believes that it is possible for adults - even though Pullman is writing 'new myths' - to read him with nostalgia: 'It is a new story but a known space.' Gavin and Morpurgo agree that story-telling ability itself is key to the crossover book - adults enjoy clear narratives. Pullman would add his voice to theirs. He is a great believer in the oral tradition - which has got to be more grist to Hytner's mill.

His Dark Materials opens just before Christmas. Does Hytner anticipate that it will offend the anti-Pullman, Christian camp? I ask the question blandly but Hytner bridles: 'We are not a church. We don't celebrate Christmas - it is nothing to do with Christmas.' Besides, he asserts, 'leading churchmen' are interested in having a 'dialogue' with Pullman. 'I don't think his books proselytise for any cause,' he adds.

Valentine Cunningham, Oxford English don (and himself a Christian) admires Pullman's achievement but thinks he is proselytising. Pullman is not only rewriting Milton's Paradise Lost but is 'consciously of the devil's party'. Cunningham places him firmly within an older tradition of crossover fiction - the predominantly Christian worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis but admits Pullman has 'taken on those guys'. In Oxford - where Pullman lives and where the books are partly set - antipathy towards the books is 'particularly intense'. At St Andrews church in North Oxford, a recent debate (at which Pullman defended himself 'bravely') took place to judge whether he was 'inculcating wickedness'.

Christians excepted, crossover should prove good box office. Tickets for the trilogy are already selling out before anyone has seen a speck of dust. The National is chary of publicity. The safety curtain is down; they do not want to give too much away. They are parcelling out interviews in a frugal, careful way. Nicholas Wright, who is adapting the books, won't talk at all (although, to be fair, he is very busy rewriting). Meanwhile, advance publicity swanks about the show's high-tech innovations - as well it might. The puppetry alone is sure to be out standing (it is by Michael Curry, the puppetmaster on Julie Taymor's The Lion King). But there must be no snooping. Hytner prefers to play all this down. The greatest challenge, he tells me, has not been technical at all: 'The first thing we had to deal with was that the books are told in a novelistic fashion: theatre narrative has to be more concise and concentrated.' In a way this was a 'relief', he says, because it gave him and Wright (author of Vincent in Brixton ) more liberty. Wright has had to wield a very subtle knife, ending the first play halfway through the second book. He has had to create a 'stage world' and slice his way through to the heart of the story - dominated by two children: Will and Lyra.

I arranged to meet with Anna Maxwell Martin who plays Lyra (and was Irina in the Three Sisters at the Lyttelton). I noticed her at the National's stage door before I knew who she was, hunched against the cold in her scarlet overcoat. Her specs made her face look owl-like. Her blonde hair was pulled firmly back into a stubby ponytail. I had her down as a part-time secretary or a friendly stagehand. When I discovered who she was, it seemed just right that she should also be like Lyra herself, a chameleon, mistress of invisibility.

Once the glasses are off, Anna is pretty in a pale way and translucently intelligent. She is a pleasing physical contrast to Dominic Cooper who plays Will. He is dark and faun-like (he was Puck in a recent RSC Midsummer Night's Dream ) and is as vividly present as Anna is intently removed. Both actors have felt, until now, like small figures in a landscape. It has been impossible, they say, to get any overarching sense of the whole piece. Anna says it has taken a long time even to get the point where she could investigate her character - because the priority for everybody involved in the project has been to discover first whether the show could get up on its feet at all.

I asked how it was to play children (they are shortish in height but in their twenties). They explained it was essential not to try and 'impersonate' children (the equivalent of a children's writer condescending to an audience). 'Neither of us have consciously tried to imitate being a child when we are blatantly adults.' Anna says, though she adds: 'Children have a different energy and we have to be mindful of that.'

Anna and Dominic are - you can see it - collaborators. They agree they would run away rather than face any of the dangers their characters have to withstand. At this stage, the production is an act of faith. Anna is particularly exercised about her relationship to her daemon-puppet, Pan, and is working meticulously with puppeteer Samuel Barnett. Dominic tries to 'trust like a child' - and leave the worrying to the two Nicholases. He is transfixed, he tells me, by some of the larger apparitions in the play, especially the 'cliff-ghasts, who are 13 feet tall, dark green with big teeth and jaws'. And from costume designer Jon Morrell, as if pulling back the curtain, I catch further tantalising glimpses: ragamuffin urchin Lyra, her hair in bunches, transformed by evil Mrs Coulter (to be played by Patricia Hodge) re-emerges suspiciously groomed and in pink taffeta. And I can almost see the forces of evil. Morrell is going for a look of 'late nineteenth-century austerity', and Lord Asriel will be played by Timothy Dalton. But Morrell's greatest headache just now is with the costume fittings. Daemon-puppets have ingeniously to be attached to the costumes. And there is no law to it. They emerge variously from 'shoulders, pockets, sleeves and hoods'. It is possible to collect many tantalising snapshots - but, like Anna and Dominic, I find it impossible to picture the whole landscape.

Talking to Jonathan Dove who is composing the music (and there will be 'lots of it') was a revelation. It reminded me that theatre can be much more than a vehicle for a novel, and that one imaginative work may ignite another. When Dove finished Pullman's books, he felt for days afterwards, an afterglow: 'Walking down the street did not feel the same,' he says. He knew he must find an answer to his own poetic question: what did the dust sound like? 'You need to hear that other world,' he said. My guess is that walking down the street may feel quite different to all of us soon, after seeing - and hearing - His Dark Materials.

[The Guardian, 02/11/03]

The site of the most famous park bench in the universe will be revealed to an avid public on Thursday - an event to be trailed by the flight of a "Zeppelin" airship over Oxford today.

The bench plays a central - and to the books' millions of fans, heartbreaking - role in Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials, by far the highest-selling children's books after Harry Potter.

The air balloon, mocked up to resemble a first world war German Zeppelin bomber, will herald the publication of Lyra's Oxford, Pullman's first book since his 1,000-page epic of war and adventure in heaven and earth.

The new volume, only 50 pages long, is set in the same alternative Oxford as the trilogy, a place where steam trains still run and dawn Zeppelins fly travellers to London. And, for the first time in print, it includes a photograph of the bench, now almost as celebrated as Dr Who's phone box

The old, lichen-blotched seat has a climactic part in the shadowed love of Lyra and Will, the early teenage heroes of the saga. It is described as existing "under a spreading low-branched tree" both in Lyra's world, where the internal combustion engine has not been invented, and in Will's, which is the same as ours.

In real life, the bench Pullman had in mind stands in Oxford University botanical gardens, beside the river Cherwell, near a tall black pine tree. A faded plaque on it is inscribed: "In memory of Jane Tomkinson and Mary Monteath". Nobody now working in the gardens knows who they were.

In the two years since the bench appeared in the final novel of the trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, it has grown into the rich literary fabric of Oxford. The pine tree is said to have been the favourite tree of Professor JRR Tolkien, author of Lord of the Rings.

A nearby collection of ivies, described as "eccentric" by the curator, Louise Allen, is visited by Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited.

Now, ahead of its official identification, the bench has become a place of pilgrimage for hundreds of people a year.

The gardens are busiest on Midsummer's Day, a date which figures in the novels. But at other times, said Ms Allen, there are "a lot of people coming up and asking where the bench and black pine tree are. Some of them put flowers there. There is also a wooden love heart which appears periodically on the bench, with 'Will and Lyra' on it." Pullman's Dark Materials has so far sold 2.7 million copies in the UK, with worldwide sales almost equally large and a film in the pipeline.

Lyra's Oxford contains one short story, set several years after the trilogy. The Zeppelin is the only publicity stunt mounted for it. Yet advance orders have already brought it top rating on Amazon.co.uk.

Pullman, who lives in Oxford, is to give a rare media conference at Borders bookshop in the city. He is concentrating on finishing The Scarecrow and the Servant, a chil dren's story due out in November next year, and is working on Book of Dust, about aspects of the trilogy.

Interest in the gardens is expected to increase with a National Theatre production of the trilogy, which starts previews on December 4. Timothy Dalton plays Lyra's God-challenging father, Lord Asriel.

A website dedicated to the books, bridgetothestars.net, regularly attracts "fanfiction", in which admirers from all over the world write stories about themes in the trilogy.

Many of these stories are about the old bench. In one of them, a 15-year-old Mississippi girl, Sarah Crump, imagines a 91-year-old Lyra dying on the seat as she urges her daughter to follow the view of life expressed in the trilogy:

"You have to be all those difficult things, like curious and kind and cheerful and patient, and you have to work hard at your dreams because they don't come true all by themselves. Give all your imagination to love and living ... And learn all you can ... because it takes all sorts to build the Republic of Heaven.

[The Guardian, 01/11/03, John Ezard]

Pullman has an article in the New York Times today on Halloween and writing about fantasy:

Tonight is Halloween, All Hallows' Eve, a time of ghosts and spirits walking by night . . . which leads me naturally to think about literary realism, and about politics. How can you write in a truthful and realistic way about something that doesn't exist?... I don't take much notice of critics, except when they praise me extravagantly. But one of the remarks they sometimes make about my work does coincide with a mild puzzlement I feel about it myself: in common with some other writers whose work is read by children, I am chided for writing fantasy, because fantasy is a lesser form than realism, and everyone knows that there are no such things as elves or hobbits or, for that matter, ghosts and disembodied spirits, so nothing interesting or truthful can be said about them.

My usual response to that is to deny that I'm writing fantasy at all, and to maintain that all my work is stark realism. But that implicitly accepts the basic stance of the critic: that fantasy is a lesser kind of thing, and that realism is the highest form of literary art.

And there may be something in that. For example, take ghost stories. I don't believe in ghosts and disembodied spirits. I used to believe in them, and I can remember how thrilling it was, when I was a child, to read ghost stories with the thought, "This could be true, this could really happen. . . ." But that was a long time ago. I don't enjoy ghost stories in quite the same way these days. The trouble is that such tales have to convince you on the supernatural level as well as on the mundane. Part of your mind has to believe that there could be a disembodied spirit full of malice haunting this old house, there could be a nameless evil presence lurking in the crypt

The drawings that enliven children's literature have rarely been deemed worthy of adult scrutiny. But with sketches of Winnie the Pooh going for

Next week the original painting for the cover to the 1982 edition of The Lord of the Rings goes on sale for the first time. The artist, Roger Garland, who contributed more than 40 paintings for the book between 1982 and 1985, has never before been convinced of the financial merits of selling these particular paintings, and admits he has no idea how to price them. To this end he is only selling one painting to "test the market" as he puts it, although there will be some rough sketches on sale as well. "To be honest, I've always struggled to find a market for my work," he says.

Given the current fever for all things Middle Earth, that last statement initially seems surprising. It's not just this new obsession, however, that has finally precipitated a favourable climate for Garland - whose mystical paintings capture the elusive wonder of Tolkien's fantastical world beautifully - but the recent rise in profile of illustration itself. Garland's work is appearing in an annual exhibition organised by The Illustration Cupboard, a company established to deal in and promote original children's illustration, and which has grown almost exponentially since it was established by John Huddy in 1996. "I couldn't have done this 15 years ago," says Huddy. "The market wouldn't have sustained it."

Children's illustration is a curious beast: generally considered the poor brother of fine art - if indeed it is considered art at all - yet part of a tradition that stretches back to the psalters produced by the Anglo-Saxon liturgy in the ninth century. Putting pictures to words is something the British have always been particularly good at, from the Medieval bestiaries - illustrated fables of mythical creatures - and the illuminated manuscripts in monasteries through to the decorative work of William Blake and the superlative fairy pictures of the Victorian artist Arthur Rackham. Long departed from adult fiction (the Scottish author Alasdair Gray is a living exception), the genre today tends to be perceived as largely functional. And even though the work of artists such as Quentin Blake and Raymond Briggs is adored in its own right, illustration has never had its own specialist gallery space in this country, unlike countries such as Japan and the US, where it is taken very seriously indeed. Recently its fortunes have started changing however, and it is now starting to pick up both the respect it previously lacked - and the commercial approval. An original EH Shepard can fetch upwards of

Orbiting astronaut sees mystery lights

Astronaut Ed Lu returned on Monday from a six-month tour as science officer on the international space station with loads of memories and at least one nagging puzzle: what caused the mysterious flashes of light he saw while studying the Earth's aurora from orbit?

Lu, who was a research astrophysicist before becoming an astronaut in 1994, estimates that he spent 100 hours watching the northern and southern lights during half a year in space. The auroral light show, which takes place well below the station's 380km altitude, shimmers and pulses depending on natural variations in incoming solar particles trapped by the Earth's magnetic field.

On three occasions - July 11, September 24 and October 12 - Lu saw something markedly different: flashes as bright as the brightest stars, which lasted only a second then blinked off again. In one instance, he called crew-mate Yuri Malenchenko over to the window to see the bursts. Lu says they appeared very different from the random but harmless retinal flashes that many astronauts experience when heavy cosmic rays hit their eyeballs.

Given his limited time and ability to research the problem in space, Lu has tried to rule out other obvious explanations. The flashes weren't like sun glint from dust particles outside the station, which rotate and last longer than a second. Nor were they meteors, which look like linear streaks. Viewing conditions were wrong for a satellite or other artificial object. They only appeared in the direction of the aurora. And Lu checked weather maps, which showed no lightning storms below at the time of his observations. All of which leads him to the tentative conclusion that he saw some previously unreported phenomenon associated with the aurora.

[

ACTORS and architects celebrated the beginnings of the first theatre in the UK to be built for children. Playwright Sir Alan Ayckbourn - president of the new Unicorn Theatre - was at the South Bank site on Thursday to see the laying of the first brick.

He was joined by (...) author Philip Pullman (...).

He was joined by film actress Emily Mortimer, who was in Bright Young Things, The Full Monty star Hugo Speer, author Philip Pullman and local primary school pupils, including those from nearby Tower Bridge Primary School.

The

This article is a response to the Article in the Sunday Telegraph, with reported that The National was asking it

The National Theatre has denied reports that it has cut budgets to cover a reduction in ticket prices.

The Sunday Telegraph reported directors at its Olivier Theatre were asked to stage productions for

The kind people of the National Theatre sent us an interesting interview with Philip Pullman from the Times.

Among other things, it mentions The Book of Dust:

"He is hard at work on (...) The Book of Dust, which continues Lyra

Novelist Philip Pullman is happy that the many universes of his fantasy fiction are spilling over to stage and screen

ON TOP OF everything else, Philip Pullman now finds his fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials, among the final 21 contenders for the BBC's Big Read. On top of everything else?

Well, it's hard to know where to begin. Clearly, anything is possible for Pullman, whose rise to the peculiar fame now available to writers of children's books began with the publication of the first of this remarkable trilogy, Northern Lights, in 1995. Before that he had been a moderately successful children's author but one who still had to earn his real living by schoolmastering.

Now he has a fine new house just outside his beloved Oxford; he has appeared on Desert Islands Discs and on TV with the Archbishop of Canterbury. His Dark Materials has been the subject of scholarly analysis: soon to appear are John and Mary Gribbin's The Science of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials (Hodder Children's, Nov 13) and Nicholas Tucker's Darkness Visible: Inside the World of Philip Pullman (Icon Books, Nov 6).

There is also a special treat for his fans: the lovely, little book, Lyra's Oxford, beautifully illustrated by John Lawrence (David Fickling Books, Nov 6), which contains a story, Lyra and the Birds, and a great deal more to entice.

Most remarkable, perhaps, is Nicholas Hytner's production of His Dark Materials, which will open on the Olivier stage of the National Theatre on December 20. The three books (well over 1,000 pages; the audiobooks last for 35 hours) have been transformed into two three-hour plays by Nicholas Wright (Vincent in Brixton) and will star Timothy Dalton as Lord Asriel and Patricia Hodge as Mrs Coulter. If that weren't enough, there will be films, too: Tom Stoppard has just finished the script of the first book.

Stoppard, Pullman tells me as we sit in his cosy study, chose not to see what Wright had done. "I'm the only one who has seen both scripts," Pullman says, with just a hint of a cat-that's-got-the-cream smile. But Pullman's own involvement with the stage show has been limited - despite (or perhaps, because of) his early theatrical bent: one of his pleasures as a teacher was the writing, producing and directing of school plays: he was a veritable one-man-band in this regard.

Not that there aren't any regrets: "Of course I wanted to be involved," he says with a laugh. "I wanted to play all the parts. I wanted to jump up and show them how to stand and where to go and what to do. I wanted to design the sets and write the music, of course I did." It was his admiration and respect for "the two Nicholases", as he calls them, that enabled him to keep his distance.

"Of course, when you take something of that size and condense it down to six hours, you lose quite a lot," he says. "But Nicholas Wright has reshaped and rethought the whole story in theatrical terms, and done it very well. The things that are absolutely essential are there."

When we spoke, Pullman had recently heard the cast read the work; his pleasure was evident, but he was unwilling to reveal much for fear of spoiling the surprise. Quite right: what makes the notion of His Dark Materials so intriguing as a staged production is the apparent impossibility of achieving anything like the book at all.

Here is a work where the Oxford we know exists in parallel to an Oxford - that of the story's heroine, Lyra - that is familiar yet wholly different. How to recreate a battle between armoured bears in a savage arena of ice and stone? How to articulate Pullman's idea - the perfect notion that reveals the mythic scope of his imagination - of the daemon, the soul separate from the body in animal form?

In a novel, writer and reader collaborate to create; in Lyra and the Birds, Lyra learns that things are not always what they seem. "Lyra and the Birds is about learning to read a little more clearly," Pullman says. "Reading is a kind of democracy. We can't create the meaning on our own, the book can't create the meaning. We have to negotiate with the book. There's no other way that reading works. Fundamentalism, for example, which insists on a literal truth, is a denial of the very nature of reading."

It isn't surprising that Pullman should pick on the example of fundamentalism; fundamentalists have picked on him, and are at it again, with Rupert Kaye, chief executive of the Association of Christian Teachers, announcing only last week that Pullman's "blasphemy is shameless". It's true that His Dark Materials contains a savage portrait of a clerical structure, but Pullman's beef is with the structures of human authority, not faith as such.

Yet there is a kind of fundamentalism in the theatrical or, especially, the filmic realisation of novels. I tell Pullman that because I am such an admirer of His Dark Materials I am interested to see the stage adaptation, but I am very resistant to the idea of a film. The film is, in a sense, already in my head, my very own film; I don't want another.

"Cinema is a totalitarian experience," he concedes. "You are dominated by the cinema: by the director's timing, the cuts he chooses, where the camera moves. Then there's the disappointment you almost always feel when you see a film of a book: you know she doesn't look like that, or he wouldn't have worn those clothes, and oh, they've changed the ending. So it's a different kind of experience."

He speaks with warmth and passion, then grins: "So why do it? Why say yes when they come to you with large amounts of money? I can't imagine why." He laughs.

His equanimity springs, I think, from understanding that his is no sudden success. He is hard at work on another fairytale, The Scarecrow and his Servant, and on The Book of Dust, which continues Lyra's story when she's about 16. More than material success, it is clear that what gives Pullman pleasure is to excite debate and interest.

Does he like a fight? "I hadn't considered that," he says at first, then gives in a little. "Yes, I am pleased when people find things to object to, I suppose. It shows that people are intereste d enough to argue. The thing that would make a difference to me was indifference. If a book had come out and been completely ignored and been remaindered after a few months - that would have made a difference."

EVENING WITH THE AUTHOR

Philip Pullman will be in discussion with the author John Gribbin about the new book The Science of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials at The Times Foyles Writers & Readers Forum: Sunday, December 7

The venue and booking details will be announced in T2. [The Times, 27/10/03]