Philip Pullman has been a compulsive storyteller since childhood, to such effect that readers of all ages are enthralled by the worlds he creates - magical, but strangely familiar. This year, his was the first ever children's book to be longlisted for the Booker Prize. Sally Vincent finds him in his lair
You have to make a speech when you announce the winner of the Booker prize. This year, it was down to Lord Baker of Dorking to stretch the tension with a few apposite allusions to current trends in English literature. It particularly interested him, he mused tantalisingly, that a children's book, albeit one that was also enjoyed by adults, had been long-listed for the first time in the history of the Booker, which innovation he linked to the fact that nearly all the protagonists in the short-listed contenders were children. Might this not, he charmed on, tell us something of great cultural significance about the very potency of childhood, the unique insight of innocence and blah blah blah. Down among the Guildhall diners, Philip Pullman - he whose books are read by the literate of all ages - finished his pudding, put his hands together for the victorious Mr Carey and felt ever so slightly gratified. He hadn't known his nomination was a first; he'd imagined it was just that they hadn't published a long list before. What he did know, having been in receipt of every other literary laurel and palm going over the past several years, plus an embarrassment of riches from the sales of his books, was that he'd probably been doing something right. Anything more fulsome, let alone apocalyptic than that, would neither interest or amuse him.
My friend Beth has been reading Pullman since she was 11. She's 14 now and still talks the metaphysical talk. She can give you the entire plot of the His Dark Materials trilogy, and knows that "daemon" is pronounced "demon" and that we've all got one. Hers changes, she told me once. Sometimes it is a butterfly, sometimes a meerkat or a mongoose. When she grows up, it will be set. She hopes for a panther, or at least a lynx. But not a dog. Only servants have dogs. There was no point asking her what a daemon is. She'd throw her eyes heavenwards: "You know, it's your thing. The thing you have ."
One day, Beth gave me a worn-out paperback copy of Northern Lights, the first of the trilogy. I checked it out in my patronising way, expecting the usual vilely written kiddies' magical adventure codswallop, only to find that it was not. This was something else.
"Thing" puts it mildly. Your daemon, according to Pullmanesque lore, is the creature of your deepest essence; a bird, reptile, insect or animal, attached to you by an inevitable thread, like an externalised soul. It is your guardian angel, your confidante, your conscience, your representative. In childhood, while you make the choices that form your character, your daemon changes; when you become an adult, it is what you have created, and it stays like that until you die. A slimy snake, a sly monkey, a fierce tiger, an obedient dog, a pussy cat: it's yours. It's you. You're never alone with a daemon. Should either of you stray more than a few yards apart, you will both suffer the agonies of the damned; should your daemon be stolen or cut away from you by evil experimenters (and it will, it will), you will not be able to sustain yourself, and you must be on your guard against such cruelty because the world is full of insatiable power-mongers who want you to be less resistant to their wickedness than you are when you've got a good daemon in tow. In other words, there are people out there who will soul-destroy you if you give them half a chance.
Apart from the purity of his language, what distinguishes Pullman from other practitioners of the fantastical is that, however far he flies into universes of his own construction, he keeps you grounded in an immutable moral and intellectual integrity. You soar into the metaphorical and the metaphysical, but never stoop to the supernatural. Here be dragons, sure, but there's none of that lazy nonsense about magical spells, potions and wands. The human condition is as dreadful as it is, and you don't get out of it with one mighty leap unless it's of your own mortal imagination, application, will, curiosity and courage. And while there are no limits to those commodities, there is no happy ever after, either; no end to the story.
In primitive societies, nobody speaks to a visitor until a decent time has elapsed for the stranger to acclimatise. Pullman observes a similar sense of hospitality. Distant barking indicates the proximity of dogs; then, assured that I have nothing against them, Pullman opens a door. Two creatures scurry in, bellies close to the floor. They are pugs. The evil genius who bred them caused their faces to resemble needy babies and their tails to warp in rigid knots above their bums. This obliges them to express their pleasure without recourse to tail-wagging. So they run up, touch you with their forepaws, sort of lean on you and, welcome achieved, they flop close by and snore like grampuses. They are immensely comforting. When we go to visit the Pullman shed, they come, too, snuffling and leaning.
The Pullman faithful know about the shed. They know that it's where he works from morning to 1.45pm precisely, when he emerges for lunch and Neighbours. They probably picture it as a kind of modest conservatory, set in sylvan splendour in some charmingly landscaped garden. It isn't. It's a shed, the sort of shed where you'd expect to find a hoe and a handmower and maybe the odd stick of rusty garden furniture, except here it's a cross between a madman's Tardis and Mr Mole's home. A defunct computer is garlanded with artificial flowers, a life-sized stuffed wolf slavers under a posture chair and billions of little Post-It notes with exquisite handwriting on them are dotted about and Blu-Tac'd on all surfaces. Three quarto-sized sheets, neat as pins, lie on a narrow ledge, beside them a posh Biro. A day's work, 1,000 handwritten words. When he became a full-time writer, Pullman went to night school to learn physically how to write, how to hold a pen correctly, how to shape letters into a perfect script, how to become so expert at the technique of sending messages from the brain down the shoulder and along the arm into the fingers and on to the page, that he'd never have to give it another thought.
Nothing, not an aching right hand and certainly not the stultifying processes of self-analysis, is allowed to interrupt the Pullman flow. "Look," he says at one point, "you keep asking me what I am. I haven't got the faintest idea what I am. I am not. I went to a physiotherapist recently with my stiff neck, and she said I had more tension there than anyone she'd encountered in her entire professional life. I'm not like this to be difficult. I genuinely don't know and am not interested in what I'm like. I don't ask myself if I'm happy or unhappy. I don't care one way or the other. I'm not even interested in what I do besides sitting in the shed writing three pages, having learned correctly how to hold the goddam pen." And he rests his case.
Pullman was born in 1946, into a postwar Britain that nourished its babies on National Health orange juice and cod-liver oil. One day, when he was two, his grandma took him for a walk in the country, and they stood by a roadside watching big, meaty builders install huge earthenware pipes in the road. They let him clamber all over the plumbing, in and out of the fascinating tubes, having a whale of a time. Then grandma took him home and there, to his utter astonishment, was his brand new baby brother. And then his memory packs up. Total blank. However, the baby brother persisted with his unexpected existence, and the pair enjoyed an amicable brotherhood based partly on the fact that, as the sons of an RAF fighter pilot, they tended to find themselves moved from station to station, knowing no other children but each other. They had been in southern Rhodesia for a year while daddy flew his aeroplanes in the action against Mau Mau terrorism when the telegram came and they were, as he puts it, led to believe that his father had been shot down and killed. He was seven years' old.
He remembers the photograph in the newspapers of mummy in a fetching hat with Philip and his brother Francis in short trousers and school blazers standing outside Buckingham Palace admiring the posthumous Distinguished Flying Cross. He took it on the chin at the time. His father was a hero - they didn't hand out DFCs with the biscuits. Only later, much later, he began to wonder. He still does. How did the Mau Mau scrape him out of the sky? With cudgels? Spears? Rifles? He'll never know the truth.
Life went on for the two little boys, now centred in Norfolk with grandma and grandpa while their mother pursued what they imagined to be a glamorous career in London. Again, there was the crippling shyness of being new boys at school, the sense of rootlessness, of loss and, for Philip, a small intimation of envy for people who seemed to have settled ideas of themselves, physically and genetically. But being RAF kids was their normality; their companions, apart from the "daemonic" permanence of each other, were similarly nomadic children, playmates gained and lost according to the adult scheme of things. Then, as sudden and inexplicable as the advent of Francis, there was a stepfather, also an RAF pilot, and another big ship to carry the boys halfway around the world. Thrown together for the duration of the great voyage, and further isolated by scarlet fever, the boys invented intricate games to pass the time; games that took on an intensity and ferocity that had they known it - and, of course, they didn't - rivalled the fantastical dramatic inventions of the Bront
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