HisDarkMaterials.org

Added another Philip Pullman biography. Find out how harmless Pullman is!

Philip Pullman was born in Norwich on 19th October 1946. The early part of his life was spent travelling all over the world, because his father and then his stepfather were both in the Royal Air Force. He spent part of his childhood in Australia, where he first met the wonders of comics, and grew to love Superman and Batman in particular.

From the age of 11, he lived in North Wales, having moved back to Britain. It was a time when children were allowed to roam anywhere, to play in the streets, to wander over the hills, and he took full advantage of it. His English teacher, Miss Enid Jones, was a big influence on him, and he still sends her copies of his books.

After he left school he went to Exeter College, Oxford, to read English. He did a number of odd jobs for a while, and then moved back to Oxford to become a teacher. He taught at various middle schools for twelve years, and then moved to Westminster College, Oxford, to be a part-time lecturer. He taught courses on the Victorian novel and on the folk tale, and also a course examining how words and pictures fit together. He eventually left teaching in order to write full-time.

His first published novel was for adults, but he began writing for children when he was a teacher. Some of his novels were based on plays he wrote for his school pupils, such as THE RUBY IN THE SMOKE.

Philip still lives in Oxford, and he writes in a shed at the bottom of his garden. The shed contains two comfortable chairs (one for writing in, one for sitting at the computer in), several hundred books, a six-foot-long stuffed rat which took a part in his play Sherlock Holmes and the Limehouse Horror, a guitar, a saxophone, as well as the computer, decorated with dozens of brightly coloured artificial flowers attached to it by Blu-Tack.

Blu-Tack plays a big part in Philip Pullman's writing process. With it he sticks to the wall pictures, notes, posters, reminders, postcards, book jackets, anything that will stay there.

Another product of technology that Philip can't do without is Post-it Notes, the smallest yellow ones in particular. They are very useful for planning the shape of a story: he writes a brief sentence summarising a scene on one of them, and then puts them on a very big piece of paper which he can fill with up to sixty or more different scenes, moving them around to get the best order.

Philip Pullman believes firmly in the virtues of healthy exercise and a moderate diet - for other people. It makes them feel virtuous, and makes them feel good if not happy. The most exercise he normally takes is unscrewing the top of the whisky bottle. If he liked the taste of tobacco, he would smoke vigorously. He is fond of sport, and plays it by watching television. He is a big fan of Neighbours, but that is the only soap he watches, as Neighbours gives him quite enough to think about.

He is married to Jude. Their son Jamie is a viola player, and their younger son Tom studies music at university.

As far as he can tell, Philip Pullman is moderately harmless and useful. He would like to carry on doing what he's doing now, and there seems no reason why he shouldn't, but if it suddenly became against the law to write stories, he would break the law without a second's hesitation.

[Teenreads]

Part 2 of the Amazon interview in which Philip Pullman discourses on Dust, the first couple (the biblical rather than the presidential pair), and which of his several worlds he'd like to inhabit. He also poses the possibility of a prequel and much, much more.

Amazon.com: Now when did Dust first come to you?

Pullman: Very early on. This notion of dark matter--something all-pervasive and absolutely necessary but totally mysterious in the universe--was one of the starting points. It is a wonderful gift for a storyteller, because if nobody knows what it is, you can make it be what you'd like! Quite early on, too, I found the phrase from Paradise Lost which gives me the title for the whole trilogy: "Unless the almighty maker them ordain / His dark materials to create more worlds." That seemed to fit exactly the kind of thing I was talking about, so I leapt on it. And the idea that Dust should be in some sense emblematic of consciousness and original sin--what the churches traditionally used to understand by sin, namely disobedience, the thing that made us human in the first place--seemed too tempting to ignore, so I put them together. Incidentally, this notion that the sin of Eve was actually a very fortunate thing was clearly a turning point in human evolution. Felix culpa they used to call it: the happy sin. And I saw it as the point where human beings decided to become fully themselves instead of being the pets or creatures of another power.

Amazon.com: Would I be right in thinking that you very much enjoyed rewriting Genesis to fit each of your worlds?

Pullman: Oh yes! The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the temptation of the serpent is for me the central myth of what it means to be a human being. So it was clear to me from the beginning that this was what His Dark Materials would have to be about as well. It would have to lead up to a garden in which something similar took place, or something analogous, anyway.

Amazon.com: You write in your acknowledgments that you're indebted to Paradise Lost, to the works of Blake, and to Heinrich von Kleist's "On the Marionette Theater." Can you tell us about this last and its effect on you and the trilogy?

Pullman: Kleist's essay, which was written a year or so before he committed suicide in about 1812, tells of a conversation he had with a friend who was a dancer. The friend told him that he had just witnessed the most graceful exhibition of dancing he had ever seen--in the puppet theater. The marionettes' unaffected gracefulness surpassed anything a human dancer could manage. They talk about grace and self-consciousness, and Kleist tells a story of his own, about a young man whose grace and physical beauty were admired by all. One day this young man was drying himself after a visit to the baths, and he noticed--and called his friend's attention to the fact--that he had unconsciously fallen into exactly the same posture as that of a Roman statue of an athlete removing a thorn from his foot. From that moment, Kleist says, an invisible net seemed to fall over the young man. All his grace left him; his movements became stiff and self-conscious. The dancer follows with another story, about a time when he had been fencing with a friend, and beating him hollow. The friend invited him to try and fence with a tame bear, and the dancer scoffed, but found that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't touch the bear with the tip of his sword: the bear countered every time. Furthermore, when he feinted, the bear knew and didn't move. (Recognize that passage from The Golden Compass? I'm quite frank about my thefts.) Anyway, the conclusion they come to is that the further we go from the human--into the semi-consciousness of the bear, into the entire unconsciousness of the puppet--the more clearly grace emerges. It's self-consciousness that kills it off. We live in a dark valley, on a spectrum between the unconscious grace of the puppet and the fully conscious grace of the god. But the only way out of this impasse, they agree, is not back towards childhood: as with the Garden of Eden, an angel with a fiery sword guards the way; there is no going back. We have to go forward, through the travails and difficulties of life and embarrassment and doubt, and hope that as we grow older and wiser we may approach paradise again from the back, as it were, and enter that grace which lies at the other end of the spectrum. There you are. Kleist says in three or four pages what I had to say in 1,300 or so, and says it better. I can't tell you what an impression that essay made on me, and how profound and important I think it is.

Amazon.com: Let me ask you about the angels Balthamos and Baruch. Their evident passion for each other might not thrill those who have already been critical of Lord Asriel.

Pullman: I was very fond of Balthamos and Baruch as soon as they appeared. You have a little shiver of excitement when somebody or something comes into the story and you know it's going to be a source of rich narrative later on. And as soon as these two shadowy figures came towards Will at the end of The Subtle Knife, I felt that. I didn't give them their names then, but I knew that they were going to be in the third book.

Amazon.com: On the Random House site, you've created the Liber Angelorum, the book of angels, as an adjunct to The Subtle Knife.

Pullman: There's a lot more that I wrote--and a lot more I might say one day--about this business of angels. It's as interesting as d

In a transatlantic chat with Amazon.com's Kerry Fried, Philip Pullman discusses the completion of His Dark Materials and a mistake that C.S. Lewis really shouldn't have made. He also offers up his favorite characters, major and minor, discourses on whether or not you can choose your ideal d

Amazon.com: Now that the last book in your trilogy is done, may I ask how much of it was by your design and how much your characters themselves created?

Philip Pullman: I guess the overall shape of it was mine--in the sense that I knew from the beginning what was going to happen and where the characters were going to go. But they always surprise you; they always do things that you don't know about in advance. So I guess part of it was me and part of it was them.

Amazon.com: Can you give me an example of a character making the first move?

Pullman: Mrs. Coulter surprised me by turning out the way she did. She was always one step ahead of me, actually. I could never quite tell how she was going to get out of this circumstance or that one, this situation or that one. And although I felt that her attitude was changing and deepening or maturing--or whatever you'd like to call it--throughout His Dark Materials, it wasn't until I was well on my way through the third book that I realized what she must do in the end.

Amazon.com: How long have you been living with these people and who was first on the scene?

Pullman: Seven years. The first book took me two years, the second one took me two years, and this one's taken me three. The first picture I had, really, was of Lyra hiding and overhearing something that was not meant for her ears. And because I liked the character that she was, I let my mind play about with other things she could be doing. And then other pictures assembled themselves and gradually came to me--like moths I suppose. They can sense there's a story going on and want to be part of it, so they flock to the little light that's glowing.

Amazon.com: Was Lyra's d