The 79-year-old author and armchair explorer likes to orientate himself in this way. As he demonstrates holding the binoculars to his eyes — which have just undergone cataract surgery — he resembles an eccentric general planning a battle. Around him are more maps — the old Silk Road through Central Asia, The Times Atlas of the World — and in case he truly loses his way, his “alethiometer” or Golden Compass. This replica of Lyra’s truth-telling device has been rendered in brass by an Oxford jeweller.
Pullman’s rambling home, where he lives with Judith, his wife of 55 years, takes a bit of navigating too. To reach this attic room, we’ve wound round staircases congested with books and through a warren of low-ceilinged rooms where heaps of bed linen and discarded clothes form rolling hills. In the study the curtains are falling down, the lampshade is wonky, there are balled-up pieces of paper scattered everywhere and a pile of black and white photographs from Pullman’s childhood.
“I’ve started writing a memoir,” he explains. “Well, I started and then I discovered that I’ve done nothing in my life except read and write. That’s all! Haven’t been anywhere. I don’t know any famous people. I haven’t done anything remarkable.”
Some would argue that writing more than 30 books, which have sold in their millions, is hardly unremarkable. As for the famous people he claims not to know, I’ve heard many cite his first fantasy series, His Dark Materials, among their most cherished novels.
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“Well, jolly good,” he says briskly, “but to be frank I don’t know them. Anyway, it’s going to be a short memoir. I’ve written 20 pages so far and I’m up to nine years old … I’m not sure I’ll have the patience to write it.”
Does he prefer creating a fictional multiverse because it allows him to live out the lives he hasn’t experienced? “Oh, I’m sure it does,” he says, his mouth twitching mischievously. “And of course it gives you a chance for revenge.” Exactly on what or whom Pullman is seeking revenge we will come to later. But this remark reminds me that I’m in the company of a consummate storyteller. Foreshadow revenge and get your audience hooked.
The Rose Field is the third and final part of The Book of Dust series, which Pullman conceived as a bildungsroman about Lyra’s moral growth, following on from the His Dark Materials trilogy. Pullman has said he never intended the books to be solely for children, although by the standards of modern “romantasy” Pullman’s characters are remarkably chaste. He has often said he doesn’t “do funny”; he doesn’t do sex either.
In the first trilogy Lyra and Will Parry kiss, but are forced to separate because they are from different worlds. Ultimately, their daemons — the animal manifestations of their souls, or inner selves — cannot exist outside their native worlds. In The Book of Dust series, there is a burgeoning romance between Lyra, now in her twenties, and Malcolm, an Oxford professor and secret agent who was her caregiver when she was a baby, creating a complex dynamic when they reunite later in life.
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However, one feels that the most important relationship is the one Lyra has with her deepest self, which is why her estrangement from her daemon, Pantalaimon, is so terrifying. A children’s author I know, who is among the few to have read the final volume, told me he wept at a scene (and I don’t think I’m committing any spoilers here) where he thought they would be separated for ever.
The series describes a shift in the global power balance, with nods to the migrant crisis, anonymous terrorists and unpredictable weather events. The influence of the old institutions and governments is waning. Pullman’s earlier novels were widely read as critiques of organised religion. However, over time, darker foes have emerged: transnational corporations have taken over Lyra’s university and the rose industry, which is central to the book’s narrative. Her world is marked by rising authoritarianism and corporate greed.
“It’s grown and got worse during the 30 years I’ve been writing about Lyra,” Pullman says. “It wasn’t salient when I started. More salient at that stage was the Church and the political power of religion, which I had a go at. It’s since 2016, when we had the Brexit vote and Trump was elected, that corporatism has become more and more visible, so it was inevitable it was going to impinge on Lyra’s awareness of things.”
In some respects the book is a quest to discover the power of imagination. “Imagination is not making things up,” he says. “It’s a form of perception.”
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As ever with Pullman’s fiction, though, there are many complex layers of metaphor, meaning and magic — especially concerning the “Dust” of the title. He tells me about a funny encounter he had a few days previously with the anaesthetist for his cataract surgery: “He’d read all the books and he said, just as I was about to go under, ‘Give me a very quick 30-second explanation of what Dust is.’ I said, ‘I can’t! I’ve just written a book of 620 pages about this.'”
But for all its intricate interweavings of alchemy and folk tales, ballads and poetry, the book has the pacing of a thriller. At times, it reminded me of reading Mick Herron, with Lyra and her motley crew of allies resembling a kind of mythological Slough House gang. Pullman is pleased by this; the two Oxford writers are in fact friends.
“Mick Herron’s a very nice man and a very fine writer. He writes about a world which is ours, but slightly off-kilter. I can’t write about our world at all. I’m not a goer-outer, I never was. It’s just me, on my own, writing for the past 50 years. That’s why my memoirs are going to be so sparse and bare,” he says, laughing.
Still, the author has lived. He was born in 1946 in Norwich. When he was seven, his father, an officer in the RAF, was killed in a plane crash during military service, and a year later his mother remarried, something he says he found difficult to accept. His stepfather was also a pilot and the family moved frequently, spending time in countries such as Zimbabwe and Australia before settling in north Wales. He became close to his grandfather, a Church of England clergyman, who had a strong influence on his imagination and storytelling, although Pullman later became an outspoken critic of organised religion.
After studying English at Oxford University, which plays a central role in his Lyra stories, he married Judith Speller in 1970 (they have two sons and four grandchildren in their teens and twenties), and became a teacher. It was during this time he began writing stories for his students.
A crucial influence on him at this time was Heinrich von Kleist’s essay, On the Marionette Theatre, in which the philosopher argues that a marionette can achieve perfect grace because it lacks self-consciousness, unlike humans. He recognised this burgeoning self-consciousness in his students around the age of 12, when their writing becomes self-aware and ironic. “That’s when the net closes in and we lose our innocence.” The only way you can get through this modern condition of irony and embarrassment in storytelling is to just ignore it.
This is a theme Pullman returns to. He dislikes modernism and postmodernism in literature and likens these movements to literature losing its innocence; he tells me he can’t read Sally Rooney as he finds her too narrowly self-conscious. “It’s like watching a film entirely made in close up. You want to say, bring the camera back a bit and find out where we are and who else is there.”
I raise a rumour I’d heard: Tom Stoppard got pulled from adapting the movie of The Northern Lights as Pullman felt he didn’t understand the art of story. Pullman clarifies this: “He would have done a very clever screenplay, which wasn’t much like my book,” he says. “He was far more interested in the business about faith and free will and foreknowledge and all that. But the story isn’t about that. We’re back then, I say, to the power of the imagination.
Looking round Pullman’s house, I wonder if he doesn’t feel the need to go out because he has brought so much of the outside world into his home. It’s like a bohemian multiverse, or a literary Where’s Wally? There are landslides of paperwork, boxes and baskets in which woollen knits tangle with dog toys, although it has not yet reached Iris Murdoch levels of squalor because everything seems quite clean.
Some of the disorder is surely due to the ill health of the writer and his wife — Pullman has suffered from debilitating arthritis and Covid, which means he no longer drafts his books in longhand, while Jude seems frail. At one point we embark on what feels like a futile mission to find his headphones. Under a deep pile of papers I discover a possibly forgotten invitation from Her Majesty the Queen to a forthcoming event.
The question everyone asks Pullman is what would his daemon be? It’s a female raven. He tells me he sees her as “a grumpy old Conservative”. He is more of a grumpy old Labour man. But while he is “glad to see the Conservative Party sinking beneath the waves”, he “despairs of the Labour Party”, which he has always supported. “To see this Labour government be so pusillanimous in the face of our enemies — and Trump’s America is an enemy — is awful.”
But what makes him most angry is the “inescapable logic of corporatism”, which puts moneymaking above everything else. “I hate it with a passion,” he says, talking of all the ways it has destroyed social bonds. I tell him his book is very political. Is this what he means by revenge?
“There’s a lot of politics in there, but I hope at the heart of it there’s a moral vision. This whole series took 30 years. And you don’t undertake a task like that unless you can do it with all your being, including your moral being. Otherwise it’ll just be frivolous, a little bit of tinsel or fluff.”
The hardest thing was getting the ending right. It’s always the bit he struggles with the most. When he gave it to his long-standing editor David Fickling, “what he said with this — as he has said with at least three of my other books — was this ending is terrible, really awful. It’s dreadful. Do it again. And he was absolutely right.”
Without giving anything away, the book does nail the landing — with a big revelation towards the end that came to Pullman very late in the process. Did he ever worry that ill health would stop him completing the series?
“I did feel that a bit, but at the same time I felt sort of lucky about it. As long as I’m writing, nothing bad can happen to me. It’s my prophylactic against death. And it worked. I’ve finished and I’m still here. Now what?”
