INTERVIEW

CLAUDIAFITZHERBERTMEETS

these forces will be the poorer for it? This is something that’s happened in the last forty years or so – since the New English Bible in the early 1960s and the decline in the use of the Book of Common Prayer and the loss of that tradition of

PHILIPPULLMAN

PHILIPPULLMANhas recently won the Carnegie of Carnegies for Northern Lights, the first volume of his epic trilogy His Dark Materials, which celebrates the success of a latter-day child-Eve in defeating the agents of an oppressive God, first published twelve years ago. This was the latest in a string of accolades which have included the Whitbread – for The Amber Spyglass – and a two-part stage production at the National Theatre. The film of His Dark Materials, renamed The Golden Compass, is due to be released before Christmas. Pullman, meanwhile, is some way into The Book of Dust, which will pick up Lyra’s story two years on and answer some of the huge theological questions thrown up by his reworking of the story of the Fall (or not) of Man. I began by asking him whether he ever envied his key sources Milton and Blake for the artistic energy they derived from the religious belief he cannot share. PP: Blake was a visionary. That’s the important thing for me. Somebody said to him, ‘When the sun comes up do you not see a round thing rather like a guinea?’, and he said, ‘No, I see a choir of angels singing.’ Blake was able to see things that other people would have said weren’t there. To my mind that’s not very different to perfect pitch. Some people hear a singer or a violinist and don’t realise that they’re not in tune whereas others know at once because they can hear what the pitch should be. As for faith, Blake was a pretty heterodox believer, if Blake the believer is who you’re interested in. Do you remember his famous demonstration that Jesus broke all the Ten Commandments? I’m more interested in Blake as an artist. I suppose I find it hard to separate – to say this is the part that’s due to belief and this is the part that’s due to his aesthetic power as an artist. The same goes for Milton, although Milton is a little easier because Blake has explained Milton so well by saying he’s of the Devil’s party without knowing it. It’s a wonderful, wonderful way of explaining Milton and absolutely true. When he writes about Satan in the first part of Paradiseall his imaginative empathy is engaged by this rebel God, and I think that is to do with his power as an artist rather than his doubts – or faith – as a Christian. Of course Milton goes on to demonstrate that there is no perfection in largescale works of art by letting Satan down rather badly in the end, where he makes him into a figure of fun and turns him into hissing snakes. It may be that future generations of children will be led to read ‘Paradise Lost’ by your retelling of the story in ‘His Dark Materials’. But what about the language, history and teaching of the Church with which your work is imbued (for all that you make an evil thing of it): do you think children not exposed to

saying the same words Sunday after Sunday which the English Church has had since 1662. I know those words so well, I can do the whole of the General Confession and Prayer for the Church Militant, and they were beautiful words. They might have been beautiful accidentally because they happen to have been written at a time when English prose was peculiarly rich and pungent – I’m talking also about the Bible in the King James version, and Hymns Ancient & Modern, but the point is that that language has all gone. It suddenly went away as if it had never been and this is an extraordinary act of neglect and vandalism on the part of the Church of England. I was brought up so deeply in that stuff that I can’t separate it from myself any more than I can separate my childish knowledge of the Latin I used to learn when I was seven. I can’t abandon that now. So when I look at a word, I see at once whether it’s a Latin word or a Saxon word or a French one and that forms part of the way I use it. The history, the linguistic charge, almost the perfume, that word carries – I can’t separate out my knowledge of these things. Similarly I can’t separate my early involvement with the language and music of the Church – it made me what I am. And certainly all the people I know now who cherish as I do these things were themselves brought up in the tradition and brought up to believe and presumably when they were young did believe. I don’t know what age Richard Dawkins was when he left his belief behind him but when he was five or six I dare say he was as fervent a believer as you can be at five or six. Of course I would be delighted if as a result of reading Northern Lights some child were impelled to go and explore the Book of Common Prayer, but I don’t think it’s very likely. As for the loss to the imagination – well, the imagination loses when it has never seen paintings by great masters or heard classical music – again I would say it is an aesthetic thing more than a belief thing. OK, leaving aside the imaginative uses of belief, what about the consolatory aspects? The Authority in ‘His Dark Materials’ is a force for repression throughout. What do you say to critics who ask where is the good that is done by religion? This is a big subject and I’m writing a big, big book in order to deal precisely with that question; I don’t want to anticipate it too much by switching a light on the

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007