INTERVIEW

answer now. The interesting – the curious – question is, if people can be helped by something that is palpably not true, is this better than denying the thing that is not true and not being helped? When I say palpably not true I am speaking from my perspective as an atheist. This perspective thing is important: if I compare the tiny amount of things that I know to all the things I don’t know, then of course out there in the darkness there may be God. So from that perspective I’m an agnostic. But then, if we imagine being inside a camera coming closer and closer to this tiny pinprick of light – to the things that we do know – then as we come closer the pinprick gets bigger, as things do, until finally it reaches from horizon to horizon and we are standing inside the light. From this perspective – which is all the things I know – we can see quite clearly there is no God, so in that respect I’m an atheist. That’s the way I look at it. Of course, as they used to say in the First World War, there are no atheists in foxholes. But if you’re in the habit of thinking honestly about what you do, can you leave that honesty behind when you’re in a foxhole? It’s very difficult – much more difficult to contain that state of mind than to be a simple believer. Have you read William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience? It’s a great book. He talks about once-born and twice-born – nothing to do with born-again. This is another phenomenon altogether, one which occurs when doubt has entered. He writes about people who have seen the emptiness and horror and futility of everything. They might come back to belief but something’s been broken. In effect this is what happens to Lyra when she has to re-learn to use the alethiometer – she loses her instinctive way at puberty. Re-learning will be a long, painful process but in the end she will do it better. This is an image of education for me. I pinched this from Heinrich von Kleist’s On the Marionette Theatre. Everything that I managed to say in 1,300 pages is in that essay. Kleist says we exist on a spectrum that goes from the unconscious to the fully conscious, and once we’ve left unconscious grace behind we can’t go back, we can only go on – through life, through education, through suffering, through experience to the thing we come to call wisdom, which is right at the other end of the spectrum. You used to work as a teacher and you write and speak a lot about education, reminding us of the cardinal values of creativity in learning which are so often honoured in the breach these days. But your vision of education is expensive – classes of never more than twenty taught by the best, brightest graduates.

What would you give up to make your vision happen? Easy. Trident. Iraq. Easy. Of course we should spend more on education. Much, much more. This recent hoo-ha about grammar schools intrigued me. When we spend five minutes talking about grammar schools, why don’t we spend twenty talking about secondary moderns? I spent some of my teaching practice in a secondary modern. It was a dreadful place. Nobody felt good about being there. There’s one other thing I’d like to say about education. Everything we ask a child to do in school should intrinsically be something that’s worth doing. Are SATs worth doing? Of course not! Would you say that your version of Victorian England as depicted in the Sally Lockhart quartet owes something to a strain of Fabianism? I find it difficult to write about the modern world – and you’re right, it is a version of Victorian England on offer in those books. They actually take place between 1872 and 1882, so just before Fabianism got going, but it was a time when the best response of the best people to what they saw around them was a form of socialism. People like Shaw. I find it a fascinating time – it had just become possible for women to train as doctors, there was universal literacy thanks to the 1872 Education Act, which meant that every child left school able to read. Telephones were coming in. I love the Sally characters. I want to go back to them. If there’s time. Were you consciously constrained by the historical and chronological framework of that quartet? How much were you itching to invent alternative worlds before embarking on ‘Northern Lights’? I wasn’t itching at all. It took me entirely by surprise. I always took a dim view of fantasy – still do in fact. Most of it is trash, but then most of everything is trash. It seemed to me writers of fantasy in the Tolkien tradition had this wonderful tool that could do anything and they did very little with it. They were rather like the inventors of the subtle knife who used it to steal candy when they could have done much more. The first book I think really did what fantasy can do, besides Paradise Lost, was a book published in 1920 called The Voyage to Arcturusby David Lindsay. It’s a very poorly written, clumsily constructed book which nevertheless has the force, the power, the intensity of genius. He uses fantasy to say something profound about morality – none of Tolkien’s imitators do this. Another thing about fantasy – I’m sure that far more adults have read His Dark Materials because they were

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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