Philip Pullman has returned to fairy tales to carve a new story about goodness. The master craftsman tells Christina Patterson how to avoid 'moral woodworm'
Philip Pullman is making a rocking horse. He likes the challenge of working with the grain of the wood, of getting the chisels sharp and matching a joint. He likes the "engagement with the world of materials". He's finished making a table for the hall, but now, with the horse, he's got to carve. "If the eyes are slightly skew-whiff," he says with a smile, "the whole thing can look terribly sinister."
He's better known, of course, for materials of a different kind: His Dark Materials, the multi-award-winning trilogy that began with Northern Lights and ended with The Amber Spyglass. It was voted the nation's third favourite book in the BBC's Big Read and has sold more than seven million copies worldwide. Even the most jaded critics were swept away: "A genuine masterpiece of intelligent, imaginative storytelling," said Terence Blacker. "Is he", asked one critic, "the best storyteller ever?"
The "best storyteller ever" is sitting at a round table in the book-lined offices in Oxford of his publisher, David Fickling. Tall, solid and slightly owlish, he is courteous, but matter-of-fact. He agrees that his work with wood is an apt metaphor for the art of telling stories. "I could do an extended riff on working against the grain and not against the grain," he says drily. "There are," he adds, after a moment's pause, "similarities and differences." The supreme rationalist, whose work has transported so many into the icy wastes of a magical north and its interlocking worlds, is anxious to be accurate. "You probably use a different part of the brain," he declares. "You have to get it right and that means knowing the properties of the wood."
If anyone knows the properties of his materials, it is probably Pullman. Contrary to his image as some kind of genius who sprang into the literary landscape from nowhere, he has been writing all his life. Northern Lights was just the culmination of an extraordinary range of storytelling skills that he had been honing in a variety of contexts for years: in his work as a teacher, where he would read the children fairy tales and write plays for them to perform, and in a range of books for younger readers.
His first book for children, Count Karlstein, was published in 1982 and followed, over the next decade, by a quartet of books featuring the young Victorian adventurer, Sally Lockhart. These were followed in turn by the now internationally famous trilogy, but also by a series of books for younger readers. He calls these books (all re-issued by Doubleday this month) "the fairy tales".
All three work at many different levels. The Firework-Maker's Daughter is both an adventure story and an extended metaphor for the making of art. Clockwork is a gothic fantasy with a sinister twist, which draws heavily on German Romanticism. It's also a philosophical parable, playing with notions of free will, cause and effect. I Was a Rat! is a rollicking romp about Roger the rat-boy, but - as the title implies - it's also a brilliant parody of the sleazier reaches of journalism. "What I hope," says Pullman, "is that the stories I write will entertain both the young readers and the older ones. What I don't want to do is to write the sort of book that has silly slapstick for children and clever stuff for the grown-ups. I want them all to enjoy the same bits for the same reason - but maybe see different things in it."
But does he really expect his younger readers to appreciate the finer points of philosophy? Or the nuances of his parody? "Well," he replies, with just a hint of the school-teacher, "they all know about David Beckham and how the papers set him up. And," he adds, "Big Brother, of course." Well, OK, but what about words like "epistemology" or "psychoanalysis"? "They might" he suggests crisply, "be interested enough to look them up."
If his younger readers don't necessarily spot shades of Candide in his new book, The Scarecrow and His Servant (Doubleday,
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