The Times Online has an exclusive interview with author Philip Pullman on the upcoming novella Once Upon A Time In The North.
Philip Pullman has a new target in his sights. After taking on the Catholic Church - and scoring a not inconsiderable victory, if sales figures for his bestselling trilogy His Dark Materials are anything to go by - he is now pitting himself against a new enemy: multinational corporations.
His new novella, Once Upon a Time in the North, returns to the familiar Arctic setting of much of the trilogy's action. Only this time the reins of power are clutched not by the high priests of organised religion but by big, brutal private companies.
Lee Scoresby, the sardonic Texan aeronaut brought to life in the pages of His Dark Materials - and on the shelves of Toys 'R' Us, where children can now pick up Golden Compass action figures - is the hero of this latest offering from Pullman's fantastical universe. Blown into the North by the winds of chance, he finds himself unwittingly embroiled in a battle against shadowy political figures driven by their greed for oil and money.
The sight of a writer expounding Marxist leanings while taking afternoon tea in his Oxford private members' club might provoke ridicule. But Philip Pullman is no phoney champagne socialist. From his comfortable sofa in the QI Members' Club, Pullman reflects on the geopolitical critique woven into his new story. “I try to look at the social, political, financial implications of everything I do,” he says. “To that extent I'm a Marxist because I do see economic forces being very strong in someone's life.”
This is not the first time he has dragged a sociopolitical subtext into his work. Before a generation of readers fell in love with Lyra Belacqua, his most famous character, Pullman was writing historical thrillers about another heroine, Sally Lockhart. The third book in the Victorian-era Sally Lockhart quartet, The Tiger in the Well, deals specifically with the issue of Jewish migration to Britain after persecution in Russia. “I've always tried to write about the world that exists,” Pullman says - which is not always obvious to readers lost in the magic of the countless other worlds of His Dark Materials.
But if he has visited political territory before, in Once Upon a Time in the North he also hints at a more topical malaise. Alongside his evident antipathy for multinational corporations sit his environmental concerns. Oil has been struck in the fictional setting of Novy Odense. “It's about the way we thoughtlessly exploit the Earth's resources,” he says of the book. “Until 50 years ago it was possible to drag fossil fuels out of the ground and burn them up and think we could do it without consequences.” So even through fantasy stories adored by children, some of these consequences can be explored - but we're still a long way from Orwellian polemic.
Pullman is clear that fiction that's just a vehicle for carrying other meanings is not very good literature. His Dark Materials is first and foremost a rip-roaring yarn that has engrossed readers of all ages. All stories, he insists, do teach something or make some sort of statement, sometimes despite the writer's intentions. “Stories that don't think they're teaching anything are promoting conservatism because they're happy with the way things are,” he says.
The accusation is not one that can be levelled at him. Pullman may be too busy trying to write his next book (The Book of Dust, due to materialise “hopefully in two or three years”) to become a full-time agitator, but this hasn't stopped him lending his name to a cause close to his heart and home: a struggle against the creeping homogenisation of Britain's urban landscape dubbed Oxford's “Battle of Jericho”.
On the site of a former boatyard in the Jericho area to the north of the city, developers want to build what he bitterly refers to as “very ugly blocks of small one and two-bedroom flats, which aren't designed for families or people who will contribute to the community”. The planning application was turned down and the developers are now appealing. Pullman, and the community he fondly calls “the boat people”, are crossing their fingers for another victory.
It's not just Nimbyism. “This is a little microcosm of what's happening all over the UK,” he says. “It's happening at Heathrow. We know the Government will ride roughshod over the people there.” So can we expect to find political overtones in his future work, too? “Oh yes!” But clearly politics will form only a part of what makes him write. What comes first is what he calls “all the sensuous stuff”.
He comes to life as he lists those physical everyday dramas we take for granted but which literature can bring alive and teach us to appreciate afresh: the feeling of putting on wet clothes, the taste of coffee, the lights you get at high latitudes, the touch of one fabric against another, the sight of someone drawing a beautiful curved line - he draws an arc in the air with an invisible pencil. These are the things he sets out to capture when he puts pen to paper. “I revel in all that, in the vividness of things,” he says, with infectious eagerness.
“It's always a struggle to transpose these things on to the page and language is not always the best medium for capturing them,” he says. “But words can evoke sights and sounds. Just look at Wordsworth's Daffodils.” What happens, though, when it comes to relaying what he calls “the feel of the book” on to the big screen? The Golden Compass, the film of the trilogy's first volume, was released at British cinemas in December, boasting a star-studded cast. There's ambivalence in Pullman's voice at the mention of it.
“A lot of things about it were good,” he says, begging the obvious question of what was not. “Nothing's perfect. Nothing can bring out all that's in the book. There are always compromises,” he replies guardedly.
Besides, Chris Weitz, the director, had to make the film without knowing whether a second or a third would follow. The adaptation did not gross as highly in the United States as expected, thanks partly to a boycott by members of the Christian right, who objected to the atheist bent of the books.
But Pullman remains hopeful that the second and third volumes will make it to the big screen, wants to see the same actors back in their roles and, as with the first one, presumably has a few suggestions to make about how they should be filmed.
A confessed movie fan (he reels off a pithy critique of several new releases), he has paid tribute to one of his favourite genres in Once Upon a Time. An episode in which Lee Scoresby and the villain McConville meet in a protracted, nail-biting shoot-out borrows lovingly from The Magnificent Seven. He grows suddenly animated, leaning forward on his sofa as he recounts the scene from the western that inspired him.
But for all his knowing genre-mixing (the new book fuses western, fairytale and adventure), and for all the geopolitical awareness that informs the narrative, Pullman is also concerned by something more prosaic: his bank balance.
His surprising candour on this point puts paid to any notion that success might have made him complacent. “I want a big audience, partly because the more readers you get the more money you get. And if you want a big audience you have to write clearly and tell a story people are interested in.” With this in mind, he has stuck to his preferred storytelling device in his latest work: the omniscient narrator.
He most admires “the great 19th-century novelists”, has little time for the tricksy subversions practised by highbrow modernists and denies there is much nourishment to be gained from exploring “the endless ways of saying things”. But even for one sticking to the traditional tools of the storyteller's trade, it's getting harder. “You can count on one finger the number of people receiving critical acclaim and writing bestsellers at the moment,” he says. The lone ranger he counts on his raised forefinger is, predictably, Ian McEwan. “I've been very lucky,” he adds humbly.
His legions of fans would object to that suggestion. As we leave the club, a young man dashes out and apologetically thrusts a greetings card towards the 61-year-old, who dresses like the schoolmaster he once was. The fan explains bashfully that his friend has just named her new baby Lyra, and asks for an autograph. Lyra's creator obliges good-humouredly. After all, his heroine's namesake could one day contribute to his living from the trade he so loves.
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