THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.102 - PHILIP PULLMAN

Episode Date: October 4, 2019

Adam talks with British writer Philip Pullman at his home in Oxford about The Secret Commonwealth, the second part of his Book Of Dust trilogy, as well as the morality of science and progress, the danger of conspiracy theories, the loss innocence, the value of music and poetry, writing, cultural appropriation and getting into trouble on social media (though this was recorded before he got into trouble on social media for Tweeting a joke about Boris Johnson).CONTAINS REFERENCES TO PLOT OF HIS DARK MATERIALS TRILOGYThanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and Matt Lamont for additional editing. RELATED LINKSPHILIP PULLMAN BIOGRAPHY & BIBLIOGRAPHYhttps://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/philip-pullmanHIS DARK MATERIALS TRAILERhttps://io9.gizmodo.com/the-new-his-dark-materials-trailer-is-jaw-droppingly-ep-1838746187DAEMON VOICEShttps://www.waterstones.com/book/daemon-voices/philip-pullman/9781910200964THE SECRET COMMONWEALTH AUDIOBOOKhttps://www.audible.co.uk/pd/The-Secret-Commonwealth-Audiobook/0241379334?pf_rd_p=aec1bfc4-f47c-4ded-88bc-f9aac613e7b9&pf_rd_r=RGYFCCWZXWN050ZJMQND&ref=a_hp_c3_banner_img_0SOUKOUS COMPILATION (SPOTIFY)https://open.spotify.com/album/3micqE30m0v5tOufe7HmlaWOMENSART (TWITTER)https://twitter.com/womensart1?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

your breath smells rose no disrespect have you been eating ratfish don't eat ratfish I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin. Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening. I took my microphone and found some human folk. Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke. My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man. I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan. Hey, how you doing, podcats? Adam Buxton here. Thank you so much for joining me once again. I hope you've been okay. I haven't been too bad. I'll probably ramble a little bit about what I've been up to, not that it's especially interesting, at the end of this podcast.

So thanks for giving this a go. Rosie is my dog friend. Half whippet, half poodle. She's black in colour, but she has a lot of white hair now as well. In fact, her hair is changing in roughly the same areas and at the same speed as mine, which is very sympathetic of her. I can't see her right now, but she's up ahead having a lovely evening walk. It's a Friday and the sun is beginning to go down out here in the East Anglian countryside. And it's the beginning of October 2019. And it's the beginning of October 2019. So look, I want to tell you about podcast number 102, which features a rambly conversation with British writer Sir Philip Pullman. I got the opportunity to talk to Philip because his latest book, The Secret Commonwealth, The Book of Dust, Volume 2, has just been published. It's the second of a planned trilogy that continues the story of Lyra Bellacqua

and her demon, Pantalaimon. Characters that Philip Pullman introduced to the world in his book Northern Lights, published in 1995. That was the first of a trilogy that he called His Dark Materials, which has recently been adapted for TV by HBO and the BBC. That begins airing this November 2019. There was a film a few years back called The Golden Compass. That was supposed to be the beginning of a trilogy of films as well, but everyone just agreed to leave it at that. Anyway, I would imagine that if you're listening to this, you're familiar with his dark materials and the Book of Dust and the stories therein.

But just in case you're not, it is an epic fantasy story which begins in a universe that's like a weird sort of vaguely Victorian version of our own albeit one that includes witches, giant talking armored bears and other strange creatures and it's a world in which every human has a demon, a physical manifestation of their inner selves in animal form. And there is a psychic link between demons and their humans, which means that they experience terrible physical and mental pain if they stray too far from each other. Myself and Rosie have a similar bond. She's over in the next field, so I've got slightly achy balls.

As his Dark Materials trilogy progresses Lyra and Pantalaimon meet Will who has stumbled into Lyra's universe from our own and the two travel between further strange parallel universes as they evade the influence of the Magisterium, a malign organisation that embodies some of the negative aspects of organised religion, of which Philip Pullman has long been a vocal critic, which has made the books controversial in some circles. But that is just one aspect of the books, which are beautifully written, by a long way the most enjoyable things that I read with my children when they were growing up and continue to read. They're filled with great characters and wonderful ideas, many of which Pullman discusses in his book

Demon Voices, Essays on Storytelling, published in 2017, which I'd recommend not only to fans of the Lyra books but to anyone interested in writing fiction or writing in general. My conversation with Philip was recorded at his home in a small village just outside Oxford in July of this year, 2019. And we began our conversation by taking his two dogs out for a short walk in the fields behind his house. I put a couple of clip mics on. And then when we got back, Philip made us some tea and I went into the sitting room to start setting up my regular mics.

I used a couple of little Rode NT5 mics plugged into a Zoom recorder. And the mics sit on angle poise mic stands with little clamps. And you'll hear me setting up while Philip makes the tea because the lapel mics were still recording. And when I listened back, I found the individual sounds of our prep enjoyable. You may disagree. As well as talking about the new book, The Secret Commonwealth, we covered all the usual subjects for polite small talk.

You know, the morality of science and progress, the danger of conspiracy theories, the loss of innocence, the value of music and poetry, writing and cultural appropriation and, of course, getting into trouble on social media. Although the conversation was recorded a few weeks before Philip joked on Twitter that in the wake of the Prime Minister proroguing Parliament, unlawfully as it turns out, of course, mentions of Boris Johnson's name brought to mind images of rope and lamp posts. He deleted the tweet and apologised for his misguided joke, in much the same way that Boris Johnson's always apologising for his misguided jokes ouch back at the end for more solo waffle but right now here we go

ramble chat let's have a ramble chat we'll focus first on this then concentrate on that come on let's chew the fat and have a ramble chat. Put on your conversation coat and find your talking hat. La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, Where are we going to walk? We've got three fields out back there. Yeah, OK. We're going to walk around there. Are these your fields?

Yes, they're ours, yeah. We bought them about five, six years ago. And we were wondering what to do with them. You know, we thought of alpacas and... Alpacas, wow. Well, we thought of alpacas, but then we thought, no, because actually we needed to put a stock-proof fence all the way around. And it's about seven acres.

And it was just going to be too expensive. Yeah. So then we thought, wildflowers. That's a good idea. we'll sow wildflowers and then we realised that you can't just sow wildflowers you have to prepare the ground. That means deep ploughing so we decided just to cut the grass and see what would happen. Yeah. I mean what we want to do is encourage wildlife obviously. Now I'd like you to introduce us to your dogs. Right. Well, these are two sisters. They're cockapoos. The blonde one is called Mixie, because she's a mixture.

And the black one is called Coco. And they're about three years old. We'll go right up the centre of this field here. In between what will be, in the fullness of time, i.e. about 300 years an avenue of limes have you planted limes? so we're planting those we've got about 800 or 900 trees native English hardwoods mostly

oak, birch, silver birch, beech hornbeam field maple crabapple. They've been in about three or four years now. Oh, really? Is that all? Yeah, some of them are growing very fast. This is going to be beautiful.

You can loosen Mixie's thing by a message. Let her have a bit of a scamper. We don't let them off because they'll be away. Yeah, yeah. And she'll be down a scamper. We don't let them off because they'll be away. Yeah, yeah. And she'll be down a rabbit hole. Mixie is an absolute fanatic for going down holes. Yes. Rosie is our dog and she is a Whippet Poodle Cross.

And we are lucky enough to be living out in the middle of several miles of fields. And so she can run off and frequently does so come on and yeah she loves yeah loves rabbit holes although she's quite timid so she won't disappear down them completely she hovers outside and is that the whippet part of her maybe are they timid dogs i really don't know much about dogs um well whippippets are the lovely little lithe, skinny things that sort of shiver. I don't know if you're Rosie Shivers, but the only whippet I had an acquaintance with shivered a lot. Yeah. And would you ever come out here and write? No.

Indoor writing only? Well, yes, for all sorts of reasons. I wouldn't in the sun because it's too hot. I don't like the heat at all. I'm not a hot person. And if it's not hot, it'll be windier than paper. It'll blow everywhere. OK. And I just need my books around me.

I want to look something up. Dictionary's on the shelf. My big atlas is there. I know you can do a certain amount online, but I prefer looking things up in books. And there's a plane going overhead, which is probably drowning everything I say. Wow, that's a big plane. What's it dragging behind? It's got something dangling off the wing.

Oh, yeah, well, that looks like a nozzle for flight refueling. Right. Oh, so that's, no, that's not a commercial airplane. No, that's an RAF plane, actually. And it probably is flight refueling because it has a sort of nozzle at the end. And you bring your empty plane up behind it and insert the prong at the front into the nozzle. Yes, it's very sexual. It starts pumping fuel into it.

Mid-air refueling. Yeah, flight refueling. In films, it's usually where things go disastrously wrong. Yes. I haven't yet seen James Bond cling you onto an end of a pipe that's refuelling and you're soaked in petrol, but that'll come. We watched the new Apollo film.

Oh, isn't it amazing? Didn't you think? Astonishing, yeah. Fascinating film. And it really, I think, gives the lie to any remaining conspiracy theories about I think, gives the lie to any remaining conspiracy theories about the whole... about the moon landings and... Well, you'd hope so. But the people who believe in this sort of thing

are so fixed in their minds that nothing will convince them of the truth. The trouble is, people who believe in that sort of thing in the first place are now, you know, living in the White House. Yeah. I keep coming across people who I presumed would be... Like, I met a comedian the other day who's, I think, funny, and all his routines are about looking at things in a different way, and part of his scepticism extends to the moon landings.

It's depressing. Because it crosses over, I think, with a sort of suspicion of government that some people have. Yeah. It's profoundly worrying, this kind of thing, this suspicion of truth. The sense that there isn't any truth. Yeah. Truth is whatever you want to believe. So you're not someone who is suspicious of technology and science in that way.

I mean, there are people who now blame... I get the feeling that they blame science for a lot of where we're at. Well, science is a very powerful tool for doing all sorts of things, but it isn't a very good guide to ethical behaviour. Right. Do you get the sense that the people at the vanguard of AI are asking the right questions? Well, some are and some aren't. The people who say it's going to be possible to download your mind into a computer and live forever

are, I'm sure, barking up the wrong tree. Yeah. Because what they're forgetting is that we are embodied. We have bodies and our bodies do a lot of remembering. I mean, things like how to drive a car, how to write your name. These are muscular memories. I kind of think my hand is conscious, my pencil is conscious. I'm believing more and more firmly in this thing called panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is actually everywhere. Consciousness is a normal property of matter, just like mass or electric charge,

and it's not something that's restricted to human beings. Some of the zealots who believe that it is even maintain that we're not really conscious at all, we only think we are, which is just the stupidest thing. and if you extend the notion of consciousness to inanimate objects and things like that does that bring with it all kinds of complicated moral problems then for how we interact with the world uh yes it might easily might not and if you start thinking that plants are conscious you have to apologize to every potato you have.

Well, I was reading about a scientist who is exploring the concept of consciousness and suffering in insects, which is obviously problematic for all sorts of reasons or troubling for all sorts of reasons, especially if insects are going to provide us with a source of protein when food becomes scarce Well that's right, it troubled Darwin actually

because didn't he use as an example this ghastly wasp that lays its eggs in a maggot of some other species I think it was in the question of whether God existed and how could a merciful God allow that kind of thing to happen. But it's a big puzzle.

Nature must be full of extraordinary amounts of suffering. So how do we rationalise it then? We assume that there's some sort of hierarchy of suffering? I don't know. Or just block it out? I don't know. It's one of the things I'm writing this book to find out. Which book?

The Book of Dust. Ah, yes. Will it be the final part? It'll be the third part. Yeah. Not, well, not actually writing it. I've been thinking about it a lot. Yeah.

After finishing a book, you're not writing so much as administering the consequences of having written. Mm-hmm. You know, when you go on a book tour and there's enormous numbers of books to sign and interviews and all this sort of stuff, all of which I enjoy, but it's a long way from what the world of literature looked like when I was a small,

well, when I was a young man, where it looked as if you wrote a book, it was published, your publisher took you out for a rather nice lunch at his club, and then on Sunday you looked at the reviews in the Sunday Times and the Observer, and that was it. But now that's a fragment of all the activity that goes on. Especially in the genre you inhabit, which is not one specific genre really, it crosses over with so many others, and you can go to highbrow literary festivals

and you can be invited to, not that they are necessarily lowbrow, but sci-fi conventions. Yes, I tend to be very careful about what invitations I accept. Simply because I haven't got time. What's your criterion then for an invitation that you will accept?

One that happens in Oxford. Okay, practical. It's five miles down the road. Yeah. And how long One that happens in Oxford. OK. Practical. It's five miles down the road. Yeah. And how long have you lived in Oxford? I studied at Oxford, went to live in London for about four years. Then we came to Oxford and I got a job teaching when I was

about 25. And we've been there ever since. Not living in Oxford itself so much as in villages nearby. Yes. Come on, dogs. Come on. Let's go inside and have a treat.

Now, part of the ritual is they have all these chewy things. Treat time. Right. Good. Well, now let's go and sit somewhere more comfortable. Would you like a cup of tea or coffee? Oh, I'd love a cup of tea. Right, right.

Hello, Mixie. 1 tbsp. vanilleekarot How'd you take your tea? Milk and sugar? Just a bit of milk would be great. I can move this out of the way this is how I spend my days now organising manuscripts signing these title pages title pages for the book of dust

and you sign those yeah there is and then they stick them in the in the book saves transporting several thousand copies of the book okay

across country how do you take your tea milk and sugar just a bit of milk would be great if you're okay sitting this side you go over there you're within easy reach of your guitar

i'm not gonna play that come on start serenading what would you play well if i could i'd play something bluesy oh yeah well actually i'm not sure what i'd really like to play is the sort of style that's known as Sukkus. Do you know that style? No, what's that, Latin American? Congolese. Congolese. Yeah, in the 60s, I spent a little time with my parents in Uganda.

Because my stepfather by then had become a pilot in the Uganda police air wing. He flew Idi Amin about, among other things. Did he really? And anyway, I spent a couple of months there, doing very little, but listening to music. And the music in the clubs and on the radio was Congolese music, a style called sukus, which has got particularly distinctive guitar sound, very high,

a lot of interweaving of melodies from different players. And anyway, now that YouTube exists, you can look up anything. You can find any kind of music you like. You can even find people showing you how to play Sukus guitar or any other kind of guitar. It's most extraordinary. Now, I can't reach the any other kind of guitar. It's most extraordinary. Now, I can't reach the tea from where I am. It's all right. Would you mind pouring it out?

I think that is the least I can do. What kind of tea are we looking at here? Well, that's a Pullman blend. Three teaspoons of Assam and one of Lapsang Suchong. Too much Lapsang is not to my taste, but when you mix it with mostly Assam and one of Lapsang Suchong. Oh. Too much Lapsang is not to my taste, but when you mix it with mostly Assam, you get a strong tea with a slight hint of smokiness in it.

That's good. Thank you. How many books have you written now? About 30, I think. It's hard to be sure because I've forgotten. Every time somebody asks me how many books I have to count them up again, it's about 30. Different sorts of books, different sorts of lengths. Does it get easier?

No, it gets harder. Because the more experience you have, the more choices you see there are to be made. And each choice is full of a new branching line of possibility. So there are times when you just have to ignore all that and keep your mind on the story you're trying to tell. All I know now, after 50 years of doing it, is that I know how to finish a book. I know how to write three, four, five hundred pages and bring it to a conclusion. You're never sure of that to start with. You talk in Demon Voices about

the concept of phase space. Yeah, I don't know if, I mean, I came across this idea about 20 years ago. The idea is, it's a scientific term for all the possibilities that are inherent in a situation. And if you look at a story like Cinderella, for example, at the moment when the invitation to the ball comes, there are all sorts of possibilities inherent in that story. She could turn it down haughtily and say, I don't want to go and meet that stupid prince. All sorts of things could happen. In fact, though, one thing happens. And when you're the writer, you have to choose the thing that happens, because that seems to you the richest of all these possibilities. And instantly all those other possibilities vanish. It's a bit like the idea of shredding his poor old cat,

which has been the subject of so many metaphors that it must be sick to death of being brought to life and killed again. You know, at one moment both things are possible, and the next minute possibility collapses and only one thing's left. So phase space is, if you like, the wood in which the path of the story threads its way. And you talk about just being intimidated by all those possibilities at the beginning of the process of writing a book, and then being haunted by the lines that you didn't

write. Yeah. Every sentence you write is surrounded by the ghosts of the ones you didn't write, which is one reason for writing on paper, as I do, rather than on the computer, because if you just delete it, I know it's there somewhere, but it's a fiddly process. If you just put a line through it and write on, you can see what it was. You can go back to it. You can return to that fork in the path and take the other one. And you were saying as well, writing is despotism, but reading is democracy. So perhaps that ties into what you're saying. You're the

autocrat within your storytelling world. That's right. When you're telling a story, you are the ultimate ruler. You have power of life and death over every comma, every full stop, every character, every storyline. Yes, and so it should be. That's right and proper. So that's the totalitarian part of it, the despotism. But as soon as it's written and published and out there in the marketplace, in the bookshops, your power vanishes and it becomes democratic. Anybody can choose to read it. They don't have to. They don't have to read all of it. They don't have to read it quickly. They don't have to think it means what you think it means, because what you think it means is irrelevant now. This is why I don't like writers, you know, telling people how to read their books. Apparently William Golding

used to do this. Really? Well, not telling, but he was very firm about what this meant. And if he thought people got it wrong, he'd say, no, no, you got it wrong. It doesn't mean that at all. it means this. And was he in general agreement with most people's theories about Lord of the Flies, for example? I don't know. I remember that detail from John Carey's biography of William Golding. I must look it up again and see if I got it right. But I would never do that because, as I said, it's a democratic one. If you think you've discovered something that might have been hidden,

well, then you can do all the usual literary critical things. You can explain, you can say, look, I found this in this book. Does anybody agree? What do you think about it? And then people can say, oh, that's interesting, I didn't see that, but on the other hand, you missed so-and-so, which kind of contradicts it. You know, it's a democratic process. This is a to-and-fro, an arguing, a talking about it, which is exactly what should happen.

This is the way children should be able to read and encouraged to read and shown how to read in schools. Instead of which, we've got a process of filleting this passage for the adverbs and constructing a lot of clumsy sentences beginning with fronted adverbials, because that's what the syllabus tells us, that's what the national curriculum tells us to do, despite the fact that no writer, no teacher, no expert in language had any idea what a fronted adverbial was before about 20 years ago when some busybody discovered it and put it in the curriculum.

The proper way of learning from books is to read the books you want, talk about them with someone who knows them, and disagree or agree, and then read them again or read another book in a different way because you've learned something reading that one. Well, first year six was an utter delight because we read what we wanted to and we did the syllabus books in the second year six. But first year six was an absolute joy. And I learned so much and I read so much. I read William Blake. I read The Beats, Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Yeah, is that best minds of our generation?

Starving, hysterical, naked. That's right. Wandering through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix or something like that. And you responded immediately to that? That was great. That's what I want to do. Yeah. Yeah. The discovery of Alan Ginsberg was a mind-expanding thing. What year would that have been then?

That would have been 1963. Oh, okay. Did you ever go and see him live? No. Well, the coast of North Wales, Harlech in particular, is quite a long way from centres of beatnik activity. Yeah, that wasn't first stop for the beatnik tour. Rumours of such things came to us, like rumours of Bob Dylan. And I would, you know, take my guitar and busk. What was the Bob Dylan song I used to do? When the Ship Comes In. Great song to do. But we never saw them live. But you ended up playing in folk clubs, though, right? Playing your music?

Not exactly. No, I did play the guitar and I did play that sort of strumming thing that you all did. You had your half a dozen chords. Yeah, ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding. That's right. And then the incredible string band came along and they were a bit more ingenious with what they did. They used their right hand as well as their left hand. And then one marvellous day, I was in London, I was going through the underpass at Marble Arch and I saw a guy playing the guitar. And he was picking it in a way I'd never seen before, and I stopped and looked at him, and I said,

how do you do that? And he said, well, look, you do that with your thumb, and that with your first, and that with your second. And I thought, oh, great, thank you very much. That was my first guitar lesson. So I went home and practised that, so I could do the write-down stuff as well. I sang at a, there was a folk club,

a university folk club, and I sang there once. I forgot the words halfway through, so I was a bit shy to try again. Yeah. This was in Oxford, was it? In Oxford, yeah. That would have been in 66-ish. Okay. Wow.

That's when the incredible string band began to appear. Yeah. I mean, Oxford's always had a good music scene. Yes. It's a wonderful way of losing yourself, don't you find? I wish I could play music i'm not a musician but i end up hanging around with a lot of musicians because i i admire them and i'm so bewitched by what they do absolutely and the times when i have been

allowed to sort of play tambourine or whatever with a band or maybe sing some backup harmonies things like that. It's the best feeling ever. Yeah, I agree. It's absolutely wonderful. I suppose if I stirred myself, I could find someone in Oxford. I'm sure I could. It was about as bad as I am at playing the guitar. What I really like to play is kind of a very early rockabilly,

that sort of stuff. Uh-huh. Eddie Cockrell. I think I could probably sort of just about manage that. Yeah. But I never have and I never will because I haven't got time. What I do mostly when I'm not writing is woodwork. I go to my woodwork workshop and give the caress of steel to a piece of wood. What are you constructing? At the moment, small things because my workshop is so cluttered

that I haven't got room for the chair i want to make right i want to make a chair rather like the one you're sitting in which is a wooden um william morris chair the bank sort of swivels i've got a design in mind and i've got quite a lot of ash which i picked up a long time ago and i'm going to make one i've got i've cut all the stuff out but i can can't begin assembling it and cutting all the mortises and so on until I've got a bit more room than I've got at the moment. So I'll have to think about my environment. Where do you learn how to do all that? Just by doing it myself. Really? When we first got married, we needed a bookshelf. So what did we do in those days? We bought three

planks and some bricks. And then I thought, well, you know, we could probably do a bit better than that. So I started making things we needed we needed some kitchen shelves so I made them and I made the rocking horse as you can see did you really I made that yes in here it's a good rocking horse listeners I covered your plan chest as well that's a great thing that's not a phrase i use very often i love your face so like a painting by picasso the eyes to the right the nose to the left other faces make me order but your features are all in a nice order. Order. You must obviously be asked a lot of the same questions all the time. And do you find yourself changing your answers over the years since you started writing the Dark Materials trilogy? People must be

fascinated by, well, in particular, the concept of demons. Has your relationship with that idea evolved and changed over time? Yes. Yes, it must have done. The idea first came to me in 1993 when I started writing Northern Lights, almost 26 years or something. And as I've written about it in the first trilogy and a couple of other little books and now in the new trilogy, the Book of Dust. Yes, of course the idea is... Well, I've explored it, and it's become more and more interesting, deeper, I suppose I could say.

It's a very good metaphor. It's a very good way of exploring and showing a person's character, the things they are willing to admit to and the things they don't want to admit even to themselves. And I discover more about the demons as I'm writing the current series. Am I right in saying that it started off really as just a tool, almost, for you to make the beginning of The Golden Compass more?

Yeah. Yes, The Golden Compass is the American title. Northern Lights of the Golden Compass more. Yeah. Yes, the Golden Compass is the American title. Northern Lights is the title I prefer. Right, right. Yeah, it was a way of giving Lyra someone to talk to when she was on her own. You know, you could either have her thinking and telling the reader what she thinks, but that's kind of boring to read.

It's much more interesting when there's a dynamic going on, that there's a difference of opinion between two characters. And make the other character part of herself was a very useful discovery. But I didn't know until the current trilogy. Well, the situation that Lyra finds herself in at the beginning of the new book, The Secret Commonwealth, where she's kind of estranged from her demon, Pantalaimon.

Because she's got older. This finds her aged 20? She's about 20. Yeah. It's not just because she's got older. It's because, well, various things have happened. still struggling with what he feels was her terrible rejection of him in the world of the dead, because he couldn't go there and she wanted to go there to rescue her friend. So he's struggling with that. There's also the fact that she has become too influenced, he thinks,

her demon thinks, by a particular philosopher, two writers in particular who've had a great influence over the way she's now thinking. He thinks it's pernicious, that way of thinking. She is captivated and fascinated by it, and they just don't agree. And the end of this argument is that they come apart. He leaves. And this was something I certainly hadn't anticipated 26 years ago when I wrote the first four words of Northern Lights, Lyra and her demon. But again, it was a very good metaphor, I found, for certain states of mind. If you and your demon are at odds, loggerheads, aren't speaking to each other, that's quite a good picture of depression, when you're profoundly, bitterly, unconquerably unhappy with the state of things.

And I just found it was a very good way of dramatizing that. So, yeah, my view of the demon and what I know about it has developed over the years, yeah. Yeah, it's so alive with possibilities, and you can think of what would a middle-aged guy's demon be like, a sort of midlife crisis demon with a little leather jacket, little demon motorbike. But the temptation obviously is to, well, obviously I don't know, but when I was reading the books with my daughter and she was asking me questions about she was eight when we started reading them and so she had questions about how this relationship worked and i suppose i started talking about an idea of a soul of some sort of manifestation of an essence of what is inside a person. And then that seemed to make sense to her with how terrible it would be to have that severed. And she understood that. But obviously, you could interpret it in so many ways.

Of course. And the advantage of doing it like this is that it gives children a vivid picture. It gives anyone a vivid picture of what it will be like. But we come to the democracy thing again. Your discussions with your daughter are just as important in establishing the meaning of the book as anything I thought when I was writing it. Because she will remember that

and the process of discussing it and thinking about it and working it out will enter into her understanding of reading in general. That's the great democracy of reading. I can't remember if you've spoken about what age you imagine your readers to be for that trilogy. No, I don't. I've been very gratified to find a lot of adults reading these books. And I think more adults read them because they were published as children's books than would have done if they were published as adult fantasy. Because adults who read fantasy know what they like and they read a lot of it. And adults who don't read fantasy, all they know is they don't like fantasy. Sure. don't read fantasy all they know is they don't like fantasy sure but this book would have had to be put on the adult fantasy shelves and many of the adults who have read it and liked it wouldn't have never never found it because they know they don't like fantasy but because it was just labeled

as a children's book and their children read it and said mum i want to talk about this book i want you to read it that's how it spread and now i, I mean, with this new trilogy, the audiences I had two years ago when the first one came out, and will be the same for this one, I predict, there will hardly be a child's face in sight. Yeah. But almost all will be adults. Perhaps because they read the books when they were children and perhaps they're coming back to them now.

Perhaps because they heard about them in a book group or something? Yeah. Perhaps because they're not reviewed as children's books. Well, they don't read like children's books, and I've noticed that some fiction that is perhaps aimed at an older reader is often written in a self-consciously deconstructive way where the people are using a lot of neologisms or modern patterns of speech to make them accessible i don't know or maybe just to to as a self-conscious effort to undermine some

of the traditions of the way those books are written but it does really yank you out of it and you don't do that self-consciousness is is one of the first things that afflict you when you start writing when you lose your innocence about books in other words when you're a teenager beginning to read books because they interest you beginning to be interested in poetry and classic literature that sort of thing the one thing you you don't want to be is mistaken for somebody who doesn't know the difference between current books and children's books. You don't want to be the person who only reads books for the story. Heaven forbid that you should ever be thought of someone who just reads for the story.

You want to read for the style and all this sort of stuff. And when you start writing, as so many people do, the classic illustration of this position actually is by Italo Calvino. The classic illustration of this position, actually, is by Italo Calvino. It's a lovely example, because he talks about the intellectual who wants to tell his girlfriend that he loves her, but cannot bring himself to say, I love you, because he knows that those words have been used without irony by Barbara Cartland. But he does love her, and he wants to tell her. So what can he do? So he comes up with this formula, as Barbara Cartland would say, I love you. That's not a successful solution.

Handing her the sugar of his sentiment with the tongs of irony, so to speak. And that's a classic example of what people do when they're interested enough in literature to want to write, but they don't want to be mistaken for somebody like Geoffrey Archer or somebody who writes rom-com or thrillers or some other simple genre. They want to be taken for a stylist and someone who is interested in language and playing with metaphor and all this sort of stuff. It's as if they have a critical voice that is turned up too loud. Yeah. But I feel as if...

It's self-consciousness. Yeah. It's exactly like Adam and Eve. When they had acquired the knowledge of good and evil by eating the fruit, the first thing that occurred to them was that they had no clothes on. They were self-conscious, so they covered themselves up. They hadn't been aware of that before. That's right.

It's a horrible thing to become so i mean i'm i'm a self-conscious person in all sorts of ways and i've always i've struggled with it and forever you know it's terrible it's like a curse so you're doing podcasts so i'm doing podcasts to make myself much less self well it's nice to be able to talk to other people i do obviously it's a conversation I crap on about myself as well. But it is nice to talk to other people rather than just monologuing. But it's very painful to see in my children. I have three children, the process of them becoming self aware in that way. I remember going to Disneyland and when my son was quite young, my first son, as you know, he must have been about 10, I guess. And we came off a ride called Space Mountain, which I absolutely loved when I was little. And my parents took me to Disneyland. It's like a roller coaster inside.

And it's all black and there's stars projected and loud music and it's a total assault on the senses. It's really exciting. Anyway, he came out and he said, wow, that was amazing, Dad. And he was all effervescent and he was holding my hand. And then he suddenly got quiet and clammed up. And when we met his mom again and she was like, how is Space Mountain? He was all low key about it. I couldn't understand what had happened anyway it turned out that he had seen some people in the queue behind us laughing at him or what he thought was laughing at him for holding my hand he thought these older

children oh yes these older boys were laughing i don't know if they were or not. That's it. That's the moment. Yeah. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know whether I should deconstruct it for him or whether that would help or what. No, it's a necessary part of growing up. If it hadn't been those kids, then it would have been some other kids on another occasion doing something else. It happens to children when they are drawing when they're drawing yeah little kids in nursery school paint with great freedom and fluency and they splash paint everywhere and they but at some point in the late years of primary school they discover that other people can draw really well and they can't draw like that so they become all self-conscious about it and they sort

of hide their work and they get kind of cramped about it same thing happens with when they move they don't dance with any freedom anymore and then other things are happening in their bodies their body shape is changing their they become self-conscious aware of the you know the effect of their body on other people and it's it's a very difficult stage to go through but it's it's necessary or we wouldn't grow up at all. And the best thing we adults can do is be sort of kind and understanding. Certainly not join in the mockery. No.

That's unforgivable. You talk about the best way to deal with self-consciousness being to pretend that you're not self-conscious. I've never heard that piece of advice before, but I thought that's interesting. It's not easy to do, but that's probably the best way to do it. It's to sort of bluff it out. Yeah. And part of the value in that is to not dump all your self-conscious bullshit on other people. Precisely.

Yeah, that's right. There's an aspect of courtesy to it. By being intensely shy in a crowd, you're kind of making yourself more important than you should be. So you're exactly right. The loss of innocence thing, which of course the self-consciousness is part of that process, ends up being the motif, really,

the main motif of the Dark Materials and the other books. And I suppose that is the thing that is painful when i'm reading it with my daughter those motifs but you talk a lot about how important it is to you to include those and not shy away from them because that seems to be the main theme of being alive in a lot of ways yes I wouldn't say the whole thing was written in response to C.S. Lewis. It wasn't. But there was an aspect of the Narnia stories that I detested, because precisely that, he doesn't allow his children to grow up. They're all killed in a railway accident. But that's because that's better, in his view, than to grow up and make all

the compromises and adjustments that come with sexuality. I think it's an utterly wicked book, the Narnia Chronicles. Did you always feel that way about them? Yeah, I think I did. I didn't read them when I was a child, you see. OK. I read them when I was grown up and I could sort of see what he was doing. So your parents weren't the kind...

Because my parents were very much in the bubble of innocence parenting yeah school so to them it was a question of shielding us from everything that was unpleasant or hard to explain about the world for as long as possible because they thought that that was a favor to us that they were creating a yeah a happy garden for us to exist in and that we'd be yanked out of it soon enough but it was their duty to try and keep us in there for as long as possible well that i understand and of course when you are a parent the one thing you want to do is protect your children from any kind of unhappiness so i do understand that but no my parents weren't particularly like that i didn't read c.s lewis

when i was a boy because they they't around. What I did read, at least the Narnia stories, what I did read as a boy was C.S. Lewis's adult fiction, his science fiction books, That Hideous Strength. I'm not familiar with those. Voyage to Venus. Ah. My grandfather had those. That Hideous Strength. My grandfather was a clergyman. father had those. My grandfather was a clergyman. And he had those because he also had the Christian apologetics, the problem of pain by C.S. Lewis. C.S. Lewis was a great popularizer of Christian theology or so he's held to be. And I read those. And then I read, because they were on my grandfather's shelves, I read the adult fiction, but he didn't have the Narnia books. I didn't read them until I was myself growing up.

But the C.S. Lewis question came up quite a lot after the first one was published and subsequently. And I was even invited to speak to the C.S. Lewis Society in Oxford here at the university. I don't think they knew what my view of C.s lewis was when they asked me but they certainly did by the time i'd finished has your view hardened do you think or did you always instinctively feel that way it hasn't changed markedly he was a very interesting critic he said some very acute and perceptive things about books including children's books. But when he was writing fiction, the devil got into him.

And there are things in the Narnia books that are absolutely disgusting. I mean, really, they turn the stomach. Cheering at little girls with fat legs, for example. It's so profoundly unpleasant that I've never been able to forgive him. Are those things not a product of their time? So, you know, is this part of that conversation about things that don't age well in art? They were a product of their time. But then you could also say that Erich Kessner's Emil and the Detectives was a product of its time,

project of its time, maybe 20 years or so earlier even. And that's the story of decency overcoming wickedness. It's a lovely story. Do you know that one? No. It's, Emil is a boy, I suppose he's about 10 or 11, maybe 12, from a small town in Germany. And this is before the Nazis. His mother is a widow, and she sends him off to Berlin on the train with a ticket to take some money to his grandmother because he's going for his annual holiday, and she's got a bit of money for the grandmother, so she says, don't lose that money, whatever you do.

And he falls asleep on the train, and a wicked man steals it, and he arrives in Berlin, and he hasn't got any money, and he doesn't know what's happened. But he meets some other boys and between them, they managed to find the criminal and bring him to justice. There's not a hint of the supernatural, no magic in it, nothing of that sort. It's really absolutely everyday realism overcoming, well, wickedness. Wonderful, wonderful book. So, you know, we can excuse things up to a point by saying they're a product of their time, but they're also a product of the mind that made them.

Lewis's mind was profoundly superstitious, profoundly timorous, profoundly misogynist, a hater of everything that was modern. My only knowledge of him comes from watching Shadowlands, the film, in which he's portrayed by Anthony Hopkins, and as soon as Anthony Hopkins is involved, I'm happy with whoever he's portraying. I think I prefer Hannibal Lecter to...

LAUGHTER ..C.S. Lewis. But when you talk about him, and I've heard you talk about C.S. Lewis but when you talk about him and I've heard you talk about C.S. Lewis before is there an element of you digging in because you know that for some people it's hard to understand because their only experience is of

oh the Narnia films they're nice it's like a lovely you go in the closet and oh wow there's a land at the back of the cupboard and what's wrong with that and then you have these very strong... Nothing's wrong with that. Yeah.

But it's the mind that's directing the story. Right. What sort of mind is it that says that it's better for children to die than discover about sex? Yeah, that is weird. People don't remember that bit very much because they generally don't make it that far. Like, most of the books, they read the early ones the early ones and then even the fans of the books agree that at the end by the end it's

it's a bit odd but there's also the magician's nephew i think that's the one in which there's a boy who's the center of the story his mother is very ill she's going to die you know she's probably got cancer or something and in this in the world of narnia or whatever it is there's a magic tree and if you eat a fruit of the tree then you'll be cured of any ill so if he takes a fruit of this tree and takes it home to his mother he knows she'll live but of course that will be stealing and he's a good boy so he doesn't steal but when he gets back home oh there's a magic apple. And he gives it to his mother and she gets better. Now, what is that saying to a child whose mother is ill, a reader? It's saying that if you're good, your mother will survive. If you're not good, she'll die and it'll

be your fault. I think that's the most wicked thing you could ever say to a child. You know, if you're a bad boy, if you don't pray enough, if you do this or that, your mother will die and it's your fault. That's the strange thing about organized religion though, isn't it? Is that it seems to me that it starts out all very well-intentioned as a set of rules and codes and guides for how to live a decent life and interact with other people in a decent way but then it becomes something much more literal and fundamentalist yes um don't leave out the stories because the story is right part i mean the the birth of jesus in the stable and all that sort of stuff and the betrayal and the crucifixion. They are what people's imaginations feed on. They're what great art, music, painting and so on, poetry has fed on for 2,000 years.

They're a very important part of it. So the rules, yes, they're there, but they come as adjuncts to the story. And there are all sorts of other considerations in play. As soon as you get a priesthood, you have gatekeepers, the gatekeepers to heaven, you know. You can only go to heaven if you do this, that, you behave like that, you don't wear that, and so on and so forth. And that leads to a sort of power over other people that no one should have. But wherever you look in organized religion that has got political power, that's where the problem comes. Because when you wield power in the name of a god who

can't be argued with, and only you have the ear of this god, that's when all sorts of terrible things can happen. The Spanish Inquisition, the Taliban. It's when political power and religious justifications for it get linked together that the most terrible things happen. But I've made this comparison before. You can have an explicitly atheist state that is still religious. Soviet Russia under Stalin had all the hallmarks of a theocracy. There was a sacred book, works of Marx. There was a priesthood, the Communist Party, which had powers that you didn't have and you had to obey and so on. There was a whole apparatus of denunciation and betrayal,

just like in Venice where there was this bronze mask on the Doge's Palace and if you wanted to dob in Signor So-and-so, you wrote his name on it, put it in there. Well, Soviet Russia was the same. If you wanted to get someone to get your neighbour into trouble, you told KGB and they'd come and arrest him, take him away. There was the whole business of putting people on trial for thought crimes. There was a teleological view of history.

History is moving in this direction. And if you're helping us move in that direction, you're good. And if you're against us, then you must be destroyed. You know, the parallels go on and on. It was a theocracy without a God, Soviet Russia. It was just as bad as any theocracy that ever was. And yet there are people, evidently, who are playing fast and loose with some of the small print in the religions they subscribe to, and people sort of pick and choose in a way now, a lot of people seem to. Well, the Southern Baptists in

America are the classic example they turn up in the you know at their mega churches and their cadillacs with their bouffant hair yeah um and um they talk about you know god rewards those who are rich and powerful and and so on but you mustn't on any account be homosexual because you'll go to hell god hates fags yes those are the i would say that's on the negative side but i was suggesting that maybe there's a positive way of picking and choosing the bits of religion that you like and ignoring the bits that you don't or do you of course i think people always done that yeah we like the christmas carols and the harvest festival service

getting married in church getting married in church and all that sort of stuff and a nice cozy comfortable corner in the village graveyard when the you know when the shadows finally close over us uh yeah we like all those things um but i suppose you could call that cultural christianity and there's no doubt that a lot of good has been done in the name of religion as well of course it has schools hospitals you know um hospitality to strangers defiance of brutal landlords and capitalists and other oppressors yes of course a great deal of good has been done in the name of religion i am making tea would you like some tea it is strong builders tea would you like it do you want some milk inside we got different types and if you want some tea? It is strong builder's tea Would you like it? Do you want some milk inside? We got different types

And if you want some sugar Just ask for it I won't judge you if you ask for it I wanted to ask you about poetry And obviously your love of Milton And Paradise Lost is at the heart Of His Dark Materials That's a phrase indeed from Paradise Lost Is it the heart of His Dark Materials.

That's a phrase indeed from Paradise Lost, is it not? Yes, it is, which I found with delight. Yeah. We were doing it for A-level, and I just, well, I love poetry anyway. I love the verse of Rudyard Kipling when I was a young child. I love the verse bits in that wonderful book, The Magic Pudding by Norman Lindsay, which is Australian children's classic, which I came across when I was about 10. I loved Hiawatha.

So I was attuned to poetry and ready for Milton. And the sensuous aspect of the language was one of the things that I responded to most vividly when we did Paradise Lost. As when far off at sea a fleet descried hangs in the clouds by equinoctial winds close sailing from Bengala and the isles of Turnet and Tydor whence merchants bring their spicy drugs. They on the trading flood through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape, plies stemming nightly toward the pole, so seemed far off the flying fiend. I can remember the day when we read that. I was reading it aloud because we read it round the class. And as I read that, my body responded to it.

You know, my hair bristled, my heart beat faster. So that had a huge effect on me. But a lot of poetry did and a lot of poetry still does. I know quite a lot of poetry by heart. And I'm always astonished at people who don't. I'm good at remembering song lyrics. Yeah. Well, and music helps, of course. Yeah. I was thinking about what is the difference between something like Paradise Lost and some Bob Dylan lyrics, for example? Do you think that they are necessarily joined with the music

and that it's a symbiosis there and it's hard to separate the two? So that's why there's always a little bit of consternation when Lou Reed or Bob Dylan or whoever suddenly publishes a book of lyrics. Yeah. In origin, they're the same thing, of course. It's words and language and meaning. But I think there is a difference. The experience of a Bob Dylan song is not the same without his rasping nasal voice

and that bloody awful harmonica that comes in. Do you not like Bob? Yeah, I love it but yeah it's a horrible noise but it's part of the experience yeah similarly a great pop song like michael jackson's thriller the part of what makes that so good is that marvelous bass sound that quincy jones concocted for the arrangement. So the overall experience of songs includes the music, it must do. Poetry, I mean the sort of poetry I can remember and recite doesn't depend on music because it didn't come to me with music, but it comes with its own auditory quality or aural qualities, rhythm, rhyme, assonance and so on, all those things, rhythm, rhyme, assonance and so on all those things

which are A, very interesting and B, beautiful to listen to and C, intriguing to try and duplicate yourself when you're writing it so poetry remains profoundly important to me Poetry had a bad rap for a while it was just the idea of writing poetry and reciting it in clubs

when I was growing up that just seemed like the idea of writing poetry and reciting it in clubs when I was growing up. That just seemed like the apex of pretension. Yeah. Even though I grew up when Pam Ayres was on TV the whole time, and she was great. Well, she was, yeah, she was great. She was funny. Yeah.

That's a different type of poetry. So she wasn't setting out to write great poetry in the way of, I don't know, Auden or someone. But then along came rap. And some of that is very interesting. The famous Grandmaster Flash song, you know. The message.

It's like a jungle sometimes. It makes me wonder how I keep from going under, which actually is a mixed metaphor. You keep from going under in the sea, not in a jungle. But you know what he's getting at, and the sound of it is terrific. Yeah. And I'm quite prepared to believe that Stormzy is great. I didn't hear his performance at Glastonbury.

I didn't hear much of Glastonbury this year, but I did like the Vampire Killers. I hadn't heard them before. Just the Killers. Sorry, Vampire Weekend. You're conflating vampire weekend and the killers yes i am but that's a good new band the vampire killers yeah well they'd be terrific if they ever got off the ground vampire weekend i was taken by vampire weekend are great

they sound so good as well like they well going back to the notion of self-consciousness, that's the thing I think about musicians that I really envy is that they seem to lose themselves in that moment and they're freed from themselves, you know. And they go in the zone the way that great sports people do. Yeah. And I don't really have that in my life. Maybe, I don't know, in small ways, drawing sometimes and things like that, but I really envy people who have that. But the presence of an audience

and the fact that it's a performance all contributes to it. I mean, you know, we can sing in the shower, but it's not quite the same as singing before 30,000 people at Wembley Stadium or something. Right. Do you spend much time online? I know you used to tweet a fair bit.

Yeah, I look at Twitter every day, yes. Yeah. I like Twitter because the limitations of thought. I was very sorry when they doubled the size of what you were allowed to send. Right. Because I like the brevity made you say what you had to say. But it's still a nice form. I still like it.

And I've made a lot of sort of acquaintances on Twitter. So you never used to do multi-part tweets? One of 25? No, no. I think that's cheating. I think it is. And have you managed to avoid getting into bitter debates? I just ignore them.

Right, OK. Some people argue with their respondents. Peter Hitchens, for example. It's a very good case in point. He'll say something outrageous in the Mail on Sunday or something, and somebody will tweet him and call him a cloth-haired fascist, and he'll argue with them. And I would say to him, myself,

what are you wasting your time for what you arguing for he's only got three followers or something he's not going to impress anybody else just just ignore them um so i ignore people who are rude to me or don't like me or whatever uh it's much more fun to interchange with people you like. And to praise things. I think that's the most enjoyable aspect of it. Those are the things that I really respond to is when you end up following, well, I follow a thing called women's art, which is a bit, it's a strange title for something. The idea that, oh, look, the women are doing art.

But it does throw up a lot of stuff that has been around for years and you just weren't aware of. And you just think, wow, that's amazing.

I'd be sorry to be without Twitter now that it's here. Yeah. But I've never been one for Facebook or Instagram. Never done either of those.

No. Do you get techno fear about, I'm thinking of this book that I read called The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism, about the stranglehold of Facebook and Google? Yes, you don't know what they're latching on to, what they're able to watch.

I suppose the thing to do is just don't do anything stupid on Twitter or Facebook or online at all. Realise that there are people watching you do this, so don't give away any secrets. Don't be needlessly rude to people, I suppose. I don't know. Because it's so difficult to understand how it works.

Well, actually, one way of doing it would be to be superstitious about it. This is the realm of devils, of invisible entities that don't bear you any goodwill. So just be careful how you go. That's a nice way of approaching it. Do you find that you've become more aware of areas of debate that you now feel much more sensitive toward? Yes, I think I have. Yeah, it's something that you quite quickly, if you go blundering about,

quite quickly people let you know that you've blundered. Indeed, yep. It's strange that people are determined that you declare which side you're on as if there's clearly one side that's in the right. And there's pretty much nothing in the world that's like that, is there? I don't know. Absolutely right.

The more areas of ambiguity and so on, the better. Unless you're the leader of the Labour Party trying to establish a policy on Brexit, then it's not good to be ambiguous. Yeah. One of the things that people talk about online a great deal that I see is cultural appropriation. Oh, yes. I saw you say once that if you had a demon, it might be a jackdaw or a magpie, something that sees something shiny and intriguing and steals it. And you've always been very open about the fact that you read stories

and you appropriate elements of them. You don't do it in a sneaky underhand way and try and pass things off as your own. But that's part of the process of accumulating that then gets fed into your work. Yeah. But the cultural appropriation argument is a new one. It's a very difficult one. You're not allowed to tell that story because that story belongs to our culture, not yours. How dare you try to write as a girl? You're not a girl. You've never been a girl. You don't know anything about it. You're not allowed to. That's a position I can't agree with because it seems to allow no room for the human imagination. No, I'm not a girl, but I can imagine. I think the more cultural appropriation there is, the better.

The more cultural mingling, the more we can learn to enjoy other people's music, other people's poetry, other people's books and paintings and so on, the better. Yeah, and to do your best to inhabit another person's point of view. Surely that's the thing, is to try and cultivate empathy. Exactly. There's a case in point with, there's this music i was mentioning earlier on youtube the other day i found a guy called ben keller oh yeah who is a musician from seattle and he living in seattle managed to teach himself sukus guitar and plays it very well and you know they were responding to his youtube clips there are letters from people in kinshasa and other places in africa saying this is great he's a good player

yeah he's doing not many people saying stop it you're white you're not allowed to play like this yeah not many people at all but that's the the right attitude. If I wanted to write about life in Sudan now, if I wanted to write a realistic novel set in modern Sudan, I'd have the duty, I think, to go there and look at things and talk to people and find out as much as I could. But then I should be allowed to use my imagination. That's part of being courteous, you know.

You want to tell the truth as far as you can about people's lives because i think the idea of cultural appropriation being problematic obviously comes from a a respectable place which is that you want to be mindful of your own privilege and you what you don't want to sideline someone else's experience because those people or that group is generally invisible and you just carry on exerting your own authority as a white man or whatever at the expense of their experience. But to then be so fundamentalist as to say you should never do it. Not that I've heard that much. Fundamentalism is bad wherever it happens. Yeah, yeah.

point that much but fundamentalism is bad wherever it happens yeah yeah this argument does come up in regard to well children's literature in the field of which there are not enough writers bame writers but then there aren't enough bame publishers either or critics or reviewers these things change too slowly they are changing but These things change too slowly. They are changing, but they're changing too slowly for us. We need quicker movement than that. I have a kind of let-out clause anyway, which is that the world I'm writing about is a made-up one. So I can say, well, in my world, it happens like this.

Well, it's not this world. I'm not writing about this world. I'm writing about another world. Yeah. Which is a sort of sneaky way out of that kind of problem. And people won't be able to get upset with the film adaptations if races

and genders are swapped around a little bit. The way that they have done about the latest one was The Little Mermaid. I think Disney's doing a live-action reboot of The Little Mermaid, and I think they've cast a live-action reboot of The Little Mermaid, and I think they've cast a black woman as the mermaid, and so there's some mad people.

And the original Little Mermaid, as far as I'm aware, had red hair and white skin. She was Danish, wasn't she? Was she? So Hans Christian Hansen. Oh, of course it is, yeah. I've just had it Disney-fied in my head and assumed that it was right of course they're all versions well this is yeah this is this is um kind of

similar to what's happening on more and more on the screen now it used to be the case that when a black actor was cast for example as i don't know king lear or something critics would say oh dear we can't have this you know this is But we know King Lear was a white man, he wasn't a black. And then people got kind of used to it in the theatre and now more or less colourblind casting in the theatre is accepted. But it took much longer on the screen. For some reason, we acknowledge when we go to the theatre and sit in a seat and watch, we acknowledge that this is being made up. They're not real people, they're actors. But the screen has a greater sort of realistic presence to it.

Or something more literal in a way. Something more literal. Yes, that's right. So if we had a Pride and Prejudice with the black Mr Darcy, we'd think, well, no, actually, he wouldn't have been black. There's a sort of... But that used to be the case. People felt it was, you know, there'd have to be a reason for him to be black.

But nowadays it's becoming a little more general for colourblind casting, as they call it, to be. But that's because, at least I hope it's because our society is getting a bit more colourblind. Have you seen any of the new adaptations of Dark Materials that the BBC are doing? A little bit of some of them, yes. But you're fairly hands-off, usually, with the adaptations, aren't you?

Yeah. Yeah, to a point, yeah. I mean, there's no law that says when an adaptation is made of a book, the book has to be withdrawn and burnt. So the book is still there. And books survive adaptations that people find disappointing. A lot of people found the movie The Golden Compass disappointing. But the book is still there.

It wasn't a car crash, though, I didn't think, the movie. No, it was... It was very well cast. It deserved the three stars it got in most reviews yeah a solid three but they didn't um they didn't finish it because well there were various problems and they didn't finish it right that was one problem at least i hope they will manage to do the whole of this on the tv thing and certainly everyone connected with it is really good. The cast is very good.

Yes, who's playing Mrs Coulter? Ruth Wilson. Ruth Wilson, she's great. She is, yeah, yeah. Daphne Keane is playing Lyra. The problem with always casting Lyra is that the time span of the book is relatively short. Yeah. But a great deal happens in it.

And if you want to tell the whole story, you're filming over maybe two, three years. And a child actor will not look the same at the end as she did at the beginning. Yeah. That's a big problem, casting-wise. How old is the actor who they've cast? Daphne Keane. Yeah. I think

she's about 15. Oh right, okay. She's small and she looks very good as Lyra. I just hope that she doesn't suddenly, I wouldn't go so far as doping her food to make sure she doesn't have any

anti-growth hormone or something. Wait, this is an advert for Squarespace. Every time I visit your website, I see success. Yes, success. The way that you look at the world makes the world want to say yes. It looks very professional. I love browsing your videos and pics and I don't want to stop. And I'd like to access your members area and spend in your shop. These are the kinds of comments people will say about your website

if you build it with Squarespace. Just visit squarespace.com slash buxton for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, because you will want to launch, use the offer code BUXTON to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So put the smile of success on your face with Squarespace. Yes. Continue. continue. Hey, welcome back, podcats. That was Sir Philip Pullman talking to me. I like saying the sir because it reflects well on me that I hang out with knights, I think.

It was really great to meet Philip, and I'm very grateful to him for his time and for hosting me at his little house just outside Oxford. I was really impressed by his carpentry. He's a carpentry whiz. He watches YouTube videos to pick up carpentry tips, and he's got a little wood shop out in his shed, beautifully laid out. Actually, I've posted a picture of myself and Philip on Twitter. And that picture was taken in his little workshop. And I really liked it.

I had workshop envy. and I really liked it. I had workshop envy. But the pieces, like the bits of furniture and a little box and the rocking horse he made were just beautiful. It was well impressive. Anyway, it was great to meet him, although you could probably hear I was a little bit nervous

and very much in kind of respectful oh god I hope I don't say anything too amazingly stupid mode but it was good and you know I love his books uh as I said in the intro that book Demon Voices that he wrote which is a sort of, it's a collection of essays that he wrote specially, but also talks that he's given. And it's really good, really interesting. So many very valuable insights about storytelling and writing and all sorts of things. And I'm enjoying the new book, The Secret Commonwealth, there is an audiobook available of it. In fact, I've got a clip that I've been sent that I can play you. It's read by Michael Sheen, who I think has read all the other Lyra books on audiobook as well. I can play you a little clip. Here we go. Pantalaimon, the demon of Lyra Belacqua, now called Lyra Silvertongue,

lay along the windowsill of Lyra's little study bedroom in St. Sophia's College in a state as far from thought as he could get. He was aware of the cold draught from the ill-fitting sash window beside him, and of the warm naphtha light on the desk below the window, and of the scratching of Lyra's pen, and of the warm naphtha light on the desk below the window, and of the scratching of Lyra's pen, and of the darkness outside. It was the cold and the dark he most wanted just then. As he lay there, turning over to feel the cold now on his back, now on his front, the desire to go outside became even stronger than his reluctance to speak to Lyra.

Mmm, the beautiful voice of Michael Sheen. Although, to be honest with you, when I heard that they had got him to do this one, I was a little bit sad and shocked because, you know, I do a lot of voiceovers and I'd submitted a version of myself reading the whole of the book earlier this year, which I think is probably a little bit better. Do what you think. Pantalaimon, the daemon of Lyra Belacqua, now called Lyra Silvertongue, lay along the windowsill of Lyra's little study bedroom in St. Sophia's College, in a state as far from thought as he could get. He was aware of the cold draught from the ill-fitting sash window beside him, and of the warm naphtha light on the desk below the window, and of the scratching of Lyra's pen,

and of the darkness outside. It was the cold and the dark he most wanted just then. As he lay there, turning over to feel the cold now on his back, now on his front, the desire to go outside became even stronger than his reluctance to speak to Lyra. Can you have two versions of an audiobook at the same time? Well, if you can, get in touch. I'm available. We can work something out. So how have you been, podcats? It's been a few months since we last were together in sonic space. Have you been well? I've been all right.

How's the book, Buckles? Have you finished the book? No. I know. Listen. It's crazy. Empires have risen and fallen. Bands have formed and split up.

The Beatles were probably together for less time than it's taken me to write this book. Just life keeps on happening, that's the problem. Emergencies, dramas, crises, personal, professional, global, political. And every time it just throws me off. I've got a new deadline though, Christmas. My agent said, if it's not done by Christmas, I want you to give up writing your book. Okay.

I think that's probably enough for this first episode of this new run, which will take you up to Christmas. The plan is to put new episodes out every week until Christmas. But as you'll know, if you're a regular listener, I am prone to a certain amount of inconsistency. So I'm not going to guarantee. But we do have quite a few good episodes in the bag. And I have got the opportunity to talk to some people that I've wanted to talk to for a long time. And I hope you'll find those episodes interesting. Rosie!

Rosie! Come on, let's go back. I've got to cut this together and upload it. Otherwise, Philip Pullman's going to send out his PR cliff-garsts. Thanks very much indeed to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his invaluable production support on this episode. Thanks, Seamus. And thanks very much indeed to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his invaluable production support on this episode. Thanks, Seamus. And thanks very much indeed to Matt Lamont for his work editing the main conversation. Much appreciated, Matt. Thank you. Come on, let's run. We've got to upload the podcast. Quick, quick. Fly past.

Till next time, please take care of yourselves i love you Please like and subscribe. Give me a big smile and a thumbs up. Nice, take a pat with me, thumbs up. Give me a big smile and a thumbs up. Nice, take a pat with me, thumbs up. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Please like and subscribe. Give me a big smile and a thumbs up.

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