‘My sincere advice to religious fanatics: Ignore the book’

In 1995, a year before Harry Potter flew in on his broom, a fantasy novel by Philip Pullman made a quiet yet significant entry. Northern Lights, the first part of the His Dark Materials trilogy, tells the story of two children who meet across parallel universes and end up subverting the Church’s authority in a breathlessly exciting journey across seas, skies and worlds. Darker and less gimmicky than JK Rowling’s Potter story, the Trilogy sold 15 million copies, earned critical acclaim,  and, inevitably, attracted moral censure. This month, as his latest novel, a retelling of the life of Jesus, titled, The Good Man Jesus And The Scoundrel Christ hit bookstores in India, Pullman shares with DNA the secrets of his craft. Excerpts:  

In your new novel, would it be correct to see Jesus as the more truly human, the more worshipful brother, while Christ has a larger vision for an organised religion?
In one way, the two brothers represent two of the types of authority described by the sociologist Max Weber. Jesus is the embodiment of charismatic leadership, which is based on the domination of the leader by means of miracles, magical powers, prophecy, and so on. Christ is the embodiment of a later sort of leadership: not possessing any sort of charismatic gifts himself, he envisages a church based on the authority of tradition. The progression from one to the other is typical of the way many organisations develop.

For an atheist, you take religion very seriously. Was religion a very significant part of your childhood?
Yes, very much so. Not in an oppressive way — simply that I grew up in the household of my grandfather, who was a clergyman in the Church of England. I went to church every Sunday, I absorbed the stories. I loved the language of the liturgy and the King James Bible. It’s a large part of what made me.

You were a teacher during the 1970s. Did interacting directly with children influence your craft as a story-teller?
I thought it would be a good idea to tell the children some of the stories of the Greek myths, simply because they were wonderful stories, and I couldn’t see that they would ever hear them otherwise. So I did that, and I also wrote a play to be performed at the end of every Christmas term. All this experience played a big part in my apprenticeship, so to speak. With the plays, I had to entertain a mixed audience — both the children and their parents. The one thing I didn’t want to do was have a bit of silly slapstick for the children, and then a bit of clever word-play for the adults, for example. Absolutely not! So I had to make up a story that would make them all laugh for the same reasons, or make them all feel the same suspense, or move them all in the same way. To take them all seriously as members of an audience.

Your characters are often adolescents caught in that awkward space between childhood and a more adult awareness of the world. As a writer, why does this point in a character’s life interest you so much?
I remember my own adolescence, both for its hideous embarrassments, and for the sense of thrilling intellectual adventure. It is a very important time of transition for everyone — transition from one form of thinking to another. We develop a sense of where we are intellectually, which is not always the same as where we find ourselves dwelling. In my case, I discovered a passionate for the arts in myself, whereas my family did not care for them.

Your books have a universal appeal — adults and kids enjoy them. What do you think draws so many adult readers to your books?
Because I take the story seriously myself, it tends to be the sort of story that adults can take seriously. And it touches young people at the point in their lives when they are going through the experiences that will make them into adults, and they can see that I’m talking to them without patronising them.

How do you react to fundamentalists and people who fear that reading your books would corrupt their children?
If I were to offer such people a word of sincere advice, it would be this: don’t make such a fuss. By making a fuss about this or that book, you only increase your children’s desire to read it secretly. Haven’t you realised that? My advice would be: ignore it completely. Regard it as beneath your notice. The more you call for such books to be banned, the more excitement about them you stir up.

Some of your writing can be viewed as being anti-Church. How has the British religious establishment reacted to this?
With a mature and unworried indifference.

The idea of a daemon in His Dark Materials trilogy — a living animal which represents a person’s character and always accompanies him or her — is striking. Where did it come from? How did you decide that a child’s ever-changing daemon would freeze when she moved into adulthood?
The idea of the daemon didn’t come to me until I’d tried to write the first chapter many times, and each time it just wasn’t working. When I discovered that Lyra had a daemon, the story became much easier to tell. Soon it was obvious that the whole story would turn on the nature of the daemon, on the moment when it settled, on the very difference between adults and children; and I couldn’t imagine how I had ever thought I could write the story without daemons.

If you had a daemon, what would it be?
Oh, my daemon is a raven — or a jackdaw or a magpie — one of those birds that steal bright glittering things.

The Trilogy has many unforgettable characters and parallel universes. How did you cope with the challenges of this vast canvas?
Actually, it was a lot easier than writing a short story. That’s the real challenge. Remembering the various characters wasn’t hard in the least: they were all so vivid to me that I couldn’t have forgotten them even if I’d wanted to. And working on a vast canvas makes it easy to solve a narrative problem by inventing a whole new world ... writing a short story is much harder than that.

From the rich joyfulness and texture of fantasy to The Good Man Jesus, which has the tight economy of a fable. How challenging was it to make the transition from a complex and layered style to one that is far more spare?
I thought I’d try to do without landscape, and weather, and imagery. The only imagery in The Good Man Jesus is when one of the characters uses a simile or a metaphor. The narrator eschews such devices. Similarly, there is hardly any description, whether of landscape or of characters. As for weather, the only weather in the gospels is a storm; but I thought I could do without that too. I was trying to get down to the bare bones of story, where there are events and nothing else. Neutral, uninflected storytelling.
Anita Vachharajani is a Mumbai-based children’s writer.