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Philip Pullman In Chicago

October 28, 2007 14:44 by Sachith Nilaweera

Tagged with Philip Pullman 4 comments

The Chicago Sun-Times has a couple of articles on Philip Pullman who will be a part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. He talks about the film ("It looks fabulous"), his critics, comparisons with Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and more:

• Author's next chapter 
• Questions of life and death

Author's next chapter

Philip Pullman on a trek toward Hollywood celebrity via film version of 'The Golden Compass'

Following Daniel Craig, Sam Elliott and Katherine Ross on the red carpet at a launch party for "The Golden Compass" at this year's Cannes Film Festival was a mild-mannered, balding gentleman who looked as if he'd be more at home in a gardening shed. The reporters and paparazzi were perplexed -- whispering "Who's he? Who's he?" -- and let him pass by with barely a question or flash of the camera.

"I don't think anybody's interested in talking to me," says Philip Pullman, "not when there are real stars to talk to."

Pullman is in fact more comfortable in a shed: The one at the bottom of his garden in Oxford, England, where he wrote His Dark Materials, a trilogy of unusually ambitious fantasy novels that have sold millions of copies and been translated into 40 languages worldwide. The first of the novels, The Golden Compass, opens in theaters Dec. 7 as a big-budget, special-effects-filled movie starring Craig, Elliott and Nicole Kidman.

If the film is a hit, the author's anonymity on the red carpets may soon be a thing of the past. But he's already a mind-blowing megastar to his readers, including the hundreds expected to turn out for two events featuring Pullman next weekend at the Chicago Humanities Festival.

Many of those readers will be children entranced by Pullman's adventure tale about Lyra Belacqua (played by newcomer Dakota Blue Richards), a plucky young girl on a dangerous journey through a parallel world -- pursued by her mother, the beautiful, wicked and yet genuinely maternal Mrs. Coulter (Kidman) -- to rescue a kidnapped playmate. Lyra is aided by a clan of boatpeople named gyptians, a Texan aeronaut named Lee Scoresby (Elliott) and, most memorably, an armored polar bear named Iorek Byrnison. She also gets timely assistance from her shape-shifting "daemon," Pantalaimon -- in Lyra's world, all humans have daemons, lifelong companions in the form of talking animals -- and an alethiometer, a compasslike instrument in whose mysterious symbols she can decipher the answer to any question.

If that sounds like a classic children's yarn, it is. But adult readers have found His Dark Materials just as beguiling, in part because of its raft of decidedly mature themes: life and death, innocence and experience, the creation of the world and its possible end by environmental calamity or a climactic battle rather like Armageddon.

The Biblical reference is intentional; His Dark Materials owes its title, and some of its ideas and plotlines, to Milton's Paradise Lost.

'He's a huge phenomenon'

"When The Golden Compass was first published in the United States, it was pretty well exclusively known as a children's book," Pullman recalls in an interview from his home in Oxford, where he also teaches at the town's famous university. "As time went on, I think it was a question of 'Hey Mom, hey Dad, you should read this book, I want to talk about it.' Later, as the second and third books [The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass] came out and I was able to see my audience at festivals like the one in Chicago, I had a clear sense that my audience was enlarging to include adults."

In the case of Lawrence "Ren" Weschler, the festival's artistic director, the first scenario applies. He was turned on to Pullman's work several years ago by his daughter, Sara, now 20, who will join her father in a dialogue with Pullman at 12:30 p.m. Saturday at the Harold Washington Library Center Auditorium. (Pullman will also deliver a lecture, "The Elementary Particles of Narrative," at 2 p.m. Nov. 4 at Columbia College's Film Row Cinema.)

"He's a huge phenomenon," Ren Weschler says, noting that his daughter is "absolutely passionate" about Pullman's books. In fact, the Weschlers became such fans that they visited the author in Oxford, where he showed them around town pointing out locations for scenes in the book.

Not all parents have have been quite as thrilled as Weschler, however. Just as the Harry Potter books have been maligned as promoting witchcraft, His Dark Materials has been controversial. Because of the fact that in Lyra's parallel world, the church has decentralized and devolved into factions -- including one, the Magisterium, which uses despotic means to track down the girl they believe may unwittingly hold the fate of the world in her hands -- Pullman has been accused of being anti-Catholic and promoting atheism among children.

"Which completely misses the point of how children read, saying they can be turned into atheists," Weschler says. "What they can be turned into is people who question things."

Pullman, an unapologetic freethinker, remains serene. "I don't think that these people who criticize me, who accuse me of being evil, have actually read the books," he says. "An honest reading of the novels would have to accept that the values they celebrate are love, kindness, compassion, tolerance and open-mindedness; the values criticized are cruelty, coldheartedness, intolerance and so on. I think the morality of the books is absolutely secure."

'It looks fabulous'

And what of the movie, which went through several screenplays (one written by Tom Stoppard) and, early on, had a change of director before New Line settled on Chris Weitz?

"It looks fabulous," Pullman says. "It was always going to be a very expensive and complicated movie to make because of all sorts of technical difficulties that had to be overcome. How do you make armored bears appear as if they're real? But computer graphics have come a long way, and it looks absolutely wonderful; the sets, the designs, the costumes are beyond praise because of the richness of detail."

The cast? "Just astounding. Nicole Kidman gives a magnificent performance, in that she's able to embody the utter ruthlessness of the character as well as the slowly growing sense that actually she does love this child, something she never thought was possible."

And as Lyra, there's Dakota Blue Richards, who'd never acted before and was "plucked out of thousands" who auditioned for the role. "Lyra is at the very center of the story, so her performance was crucial. Fortunately, she's wonderful."

The best news for Pullman's fans may be that he isn't done with the His Dark Materials characters yet. Next spring, he says, he'll publish Once Upon a Time in the North, a novella about the early adventures of Lee Scoresby and Iorek Byrnison. He's also in the early stages of working on The Book of Dust, a new novel about Lyra, this time at the age of 16.

First, though, there are plenty more red carpets to walk.

Questions of life and death

Since Philip Pullman lives in Oxford and teaches at its famous university -- and since he's the author of a best-selling series of children's books that have been turned into successful movies -- it's inevitable that he's often discussed in connection with two other Oxfordian fantasists, J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings) and C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia).

It's not a comparison Pullman is comfortable with -- not out of modesty, as one might expect, but because he's not a fan of either Tolkien or Lewis. In fact, he has raised eyebrows (and hackles) by being openly dismissive of the former and in passionate disagreement with key aspects of the latter's work.

In an interview, Pullman kisses off The Lord of the Rings as "an essentially trivial work" that fails to address serious moral issues. "For Tolkien, a staunch Catholic, the major questions of life and death were already answered," he says. "The church had the answer."

As for Tolkien's well-known disapproval of Lewis' books for their mixing of Christian and mythological source materials -- Narnia features both Father Christmas and centaurs, for example -- Pullman practically snorts with derision.

"Tolkien was a bit of a purist," says Pullman, whose characters in His Dark Materials include humans, polar bears, witches, angels (including a pair who are apparently gay), harpies and a Hades-like underworld reached with the help of a grim boatman who ferries the dead across a river very like the Styx. "When Tolkien says that about Narnia, he's being a little unrealistic about the nature of myth. I steal anything from anywhere, as long as it's magnificent."

He's kinder to Lewis, whose Christian-themed Narnia series "does at least attempt to meet these questions -- of temptation, of examining one's own conscience, of faith and courage and so on. Narnia is not a trivial work, and I respect it. What I dislike, however, is the conclusion that Lewis comes to."

That conclusion involves a train crash and the implication that one of the characters, Susan Pevensie, will be excluded from salvation, partly for reasons having to do with her burgeoning sexuality -- which, for Pullman, spoils the whole series.

"A child becoming aware of the coming of sexual attraction, of the changing nature of her own body, of lipstick and nylons -- for Lewis this was a thing of horror," Pullman says. "It was preferable for him to kill off all these characters rather than to allow them to turn the wisdom and knowledge they had gained to good effect. For me, I thought it was better for Lyra [who enters puberty and finds love near the end of His Dark Materials] to go on living in the world and carry on making it better."

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