This month marks 30 years since the arrival on U.S. shores of “The Golden Compass,” an award-winning British fantasy classic that’s been published in dozens of countries. The book has spawned two trilogies, “His Dark Materials” and “The Book of Dust.”
Pullman’s world, dominated by a religious organization called the Magisterium and a mysterious substance called Dust, has captivated millions of readers around the world. Host Indira Lakshmanan is one of those captivated readers. She recently spoke with Pullman about the books.
Interview highlights
On the origin on Pullman’s heroine Lyra:
“I don’t know how I came to Lyra or she came to me. I knew the sort of story I wanted to write, which is a long sort of, I suppose you have to call it fantasy, though I didn’t like that word very much, and she was demanding to have her story told.”
On the idea of daemons, the animal companions that exist in the world of Pullman’s books:
“That wasn’t part of the story originally. I found myself with this little girl in this ancient Oxford College. She’s going to [a] part of the college where she’s not supposed to be, and she overhears something she’s not supposed to overhear. Now, the question for the storyteller is how do we make that interesting? And the most obvious way you can make something [interesting is] by having somebody else there that she can talk to. But having a real person there would confuse it, because…the story’s Lyra’s story, not anybody else’s.
“And then I thought, well, supposing she had someone to talk to that was like a guardian angel or like a little spirit animal or something like that. And then she can say, ‘Let’s go in here.’ And he can say, ‘No, we’re not supposed to.’ And she can say, ‘Oh, don’t be such a coward.’ He’d say, ‘Listen, they’re coming. Be quiet.’ And it was all much more dramatic and easy to write.
“In Lyra’s world, everybody has a daemon with them and they can talk to it and other people can see it and so on. And that actually turned out to be a very good idea because all sorts of things could develop from that. For example, as we find out in one of the later books, what happens if your daemon disappears? What happens if it just leaves? And if your daemon becomes ill, does that mean you become ill? Or if you don’t like your daemon, what happens then? You live a life that is very unhappy because you’re quarrelling with yourself all the time.
“When you’re a child in Lyra’s world, your daemon can change shape. It can be a moth one minute, a snake the next, a dog, a cat, a cow, anything. But when you go through puberty, you leave that innocence behind and your daemon settles down into one fixed shape, which [it] will have for the rest of your life. So, a daemon exists to tell you something about yourself. If your daemon is a snake, for example, it doesn’t mean you’ll be evil or poisonous or anything like that. What it means is there’ll be something serpentine about your nature. You won’t be big and blundering aloud and obvious. You’ll be subtle and quiet. So that’s another aspect of the demon, which I was able to use and discover as I went through. ”
On Pullman’s atheism and his depiction of a world dominated by a religious organization, the Magisterium:
“What troubles me about religion is not what people believe, but what they do to gain power over other people. The real difficulty comes when religion meets power or acquires power, political power. Because once you’re doing something in the name of God, you can do anything you like and no one can argue with you.”
On continuing Lyra’s story in the second trilogy “The Book of Dust”:
“In the first trilogy, Lyra has this extraordinary adventure, and then she goes back home to Oxford. Well, what then? Life would be very dull if you’ve been through that adventure and then have to go back to a normal life. So, Lyra had to have another adventure, it seemed to me.
“And what I hadn’t looked at closely in the first trilogy was the whole business of what dust is and what part the imagination plays in it. And I found that I could explore this question by having Lyra and [her daemon] Pantalaimon disagree and argue, and he gets very impatient with her and says, ‘You’ve lost your imagination. You used to have an imagination and now it’s gone. Well, I’m going to look for it.’ And he sets off, he leaves her and he says he’s gone to look for her imagination. She doesn’t know what this means. How do you find an imagination? And she sets off to follow him. And so, Lyra, eventually, I’ll sort of spoil a story now by telling you that Lyra does, in the end, finds her imagination and finds that that’s what dust was all the time.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
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Emiko Tamagawa produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Tamagawa also adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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