And then realizing what he was actually doing was dropping bombs on people with spears and knives. I saw his death in a different light, really. And then you found out not long ago that he had died in an accident. He was on a plane with someone else, either a passenger or an observer or something, and they crashed into a hillside.
She was a woman whom the war had also affected. She was the daughter of the country clergyman, my grandfather. Her younger brother, my uncle Tony, was sent to a good school and became a doctor.
So my poor mother, who was certainly bright enough to have got in a university and got an interesting career, never did. And she always felt deprived by that. She did write. She wrote a great deal of poetry when she was young, during the war, poetry about dashing pilots who flew off in the moonlight and that sort of thing. She could have written, I think. She was a great reader. But it never seemed to work out. She married a year or two later.
He was also in the R. And I still remember a lot of the details: the color of the sea in different parts of the world, the way the waves were longer somehow around the Cape of Good Hope.
Because it was there that I became an adolescent. I started learning to read things that I wanted to read. I started to discover that I was intoxicated by poetry. I wrote a great deal of poetry. It was also the time when such things as the Beatles and Bob Dylan were occurring. Every child, everybody who was a teen-ager in those years, was affected in some way by them.
You were a teen-ager in the best time to be a teen-ager probably ever. And I gather that you continue to think highly of adolescence. When I became a teacher, I was teaching children who were eleven to thirteen, that sort of age. Their lives were beginning to open out in terms of intellectual curiosity, in terms of emotional maturity, in terms of physical changes.
I suppose that happens, but I think most kids look forward rather than back. They want to be grown-up. They want to smoke cigarettes and get drunk and have sex, and they want to have a bit of money and drive around in cars. The nostalgia is an adult thing, not a childhood thing. Your books were very important to my own early adolescence.
I think there was more explicit description of the effects of hormones! Well, this has to do probably with the publisher that I was with. And that meant various things. It meant that it was put on bookshelves in different parts of bookshops. Even, dare I say, eager to be offended. So I think people have to be more careful. Hardly any children at all. Well, not quite. I hate books written in the present tense! I refuse to read them. You read English at Exeter College at Oxford, but I gather that you did not fall in love with academia.
I made the mistake that I think a lot of people have made—thinking that, because you like reading and you like writing, English is the thing to study. I should have done something completely different. I should have been an engineer or gone to a college of furniture-making and learned to use tools.
I should have done something like that. I enjoyed the reading. I enjoyed—because it was the middle of the sixties—all the hippie stuff, all the dressing-in-funny-clothes stuff, and all the rock-music stuff. Did you find time on your own to read philosophy and psychology? I read them in an amateur way, which was what I should have stuck to with English.
I should have been doing something else, something practical, something with my hands. I love working with my hands. Yes, I do. When I was first married, nearly fifty years ago, we needed a bookcase, so I bought some wood and some screws and made a rickety old thing, but it was my first go at it.
I want to ask you about Milton. Because I first read Milton because of you. Oh, right! Well, I first read Milton because of the exam system in English education. We had to do these exams called A Levels, which are taken in the two years before you go to university. So we read aloud the first two books—the best two books, really. The landscape of Hell, the revolution of the devils to make war on God.
That actually had a physical effect on me; my skin bristled and my heart beat faster. Turmoil in the Middle East and Central Asia has forced thousands of refugees to flee their homelands and take to the sea in the hope of reaching safety. And the crux of it all is her, and our, understanding of the term imagination. She is surprised to find how hurt she feels by this accusation.
Well, not quite. I learned long ago that while their authority might be supreme in their own books, in my book the authority was mine. I make the rules here. Most of the rules elsewhere, though, are increasingly policed by algorithms.
The publishing life of His Dark Materials happened to coincide with several enormous changes in the world of bookselling and publishing, all connected: the end of the net book agreement and the arrival of the massive discounting of bestsellers, the vast sudden undreamed-of might of Amazon and online bookselling, and the development of electronic point-of-sale data such as Nielsen BookScan, which enabled publishers to keep a much closer eye on what was actually selling.
These developments affected His Dark Materials as they did every other book published in the past 25 years or so. They were not developed to help writers.
But these frontiers are permeable. Serendipity is a much better guide to discovery and pleasure than knowing what you like and sticking to it. There are large areas of life where algorithms are no help. Whether my last or hers remains to be seen. This feeling came to a head during a visit she paid to the northern lands a year after the witch Yelena Pazhets had nearly killed her in Oxford: the time when Lyra had been saved by the birds.
Ironically enough, in later years Pullman reflected on his time as a student of English as not being very inspiring and clearly states that it was not an enjoyable experience for him. While there, he wrote the first of many school plays and began work on his first published novel, The Haunted Storm.
Over the next several years, Pullman continued teaching at school and simultaneously worked on his plays and novels. He published a few more books over the next few years, most notably Galatea in and The Ruby in the Smoke, the first of his Sally Lockhart series, in With the publication and critical success of The Ruby in the Smoke, Philip Pullman became well-established as a writer of young adult fiction and was well on his way to becoming one of the most prodigious literary talents of our time.
While he continued to create plays for school children, he also began work on a series of more adult novels at this time, the first of which was published in Entitled The Northern Lights, it was the first book of his seminal trilogy, His Dark Materials and gained him critical acclaim as well as a number of literary awards, including the highly prestigious Carnegie Medal.
The Northern Lights is the first installment in the chronicles of a young English girl named Lyra Belacqua, who lives in a parallel universe dominated by the authority and tyranny of a body known as the Magesterium, which forms a theocracy that is single-mindedly devoted to the ruthless suppression of anything they deem to be heresy.
It is a complicated world, in which humans lives with a disjointed soul that is embodied in the form of an animal companion, called a daemon. In this world, each human has a daemon of their own that accompanies them throughout their life — the daemon is an integral part of the human being it is attached to, and no human can survive detached from their daemon.
During a visit to his niece, he disappears mysteriously through a portal into a parallel universe. Determined to find her friend and her uncle, Lyra embarks on a quest to save them, aided by her daemon and an alethiometer, a four-sided compass which points her unerringly to the truth. Over the course of a series of adventures, Lyra finds her uncle, only to discover that he is really her father and that his purpose all along was to use Roger to his advantage.
In the final act of the novel, Lord Asriel severs Roger from his daemon and the resultant violent energy causes a massive explosion to rip through time and space, opening the door for Asriel to enter the parallel universe he has been searching for.
As he enters the portal, he vows to find the Dust and destroy it. However, Lyra knows now that her father cannot be trusted, and suspecting that the Dust is worth protecting, she enters the void along with her daemon to stop her father from carrying out his plans. However, box office reviews were mixed and any plans to adapt the remaining works in the series into movies have been put on hold indefinitely.
Coulter, in order to support the cause of the evil Lord Asriel. Matters are further complicated by the discovery of a knife, which when wielded by its true guardian can protect people from the evil Spectres, which prey on the souls of people in this parallel universe.
Will finds that he is the true guardian of the knife and the young protagonists struggle to keep this vitally valuable weapon from Lord Asriel and Mrs. As the book winds to a close, Lyra disappears, leaving behind her prized alethiometer. Determined to find her, Will continues on his journey, temporarily abandoning his quest for Lord Asriel. Like most of his works, the His Dark Materials trilogy has received rave reviews and a great deal of critical acclaim. An avowed atheist and philosopher, Pullman takes these criticisms in stride, arguing that his goal is to present a new interpretation of the typical religious duality, presenting the world in shades of grey where morality is really in the eye of the beholder.
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