The Most Dangerous Man in England?

With the film of The Golden Compass being last year’s Christmas blockbuster, the book of the same name finds itself banned by American libraries for its ‘anti-Christian’ message. Stanley Campbell investigates the dark materials of Philip Pullman.

It was the right-wing commentator Peter Hitchens who termed Philip Pullman ‘the most dangerous man in England’. His provocation was the trilogy of books written for children which Pullman collectively called His Dark Materials. The phrase is lifted from Milton’s Paradise Lost and his books famously deal with the same subjects of good versus evil, temptation and obligation, man and animals, God and Satan. Of concern to religious groups is the trilogy’s portrayal of the Church as villains and the story of God as a myth concocted for human consumption by an over-reaching, and ultimately pathetically slain, angel.

It’s for these reasons that in November 2007, a month before the film of the first of trilogy, The Golden Compass, opened, that libraries and schools in the United States began to question whether it was a series suitable for children.

Grand Blanc’s West Middle School Superintendent Michael Newton denies that the book was banned for its anti-Christian message, however. ‘It’s nothing to do with the book,’ he told the Flint Journal. ‘Once in a while you’ll have a teacher who loves a book and decides to teach it. That’s what this teacher did.’

The Catholic League is not so coy. It has issued a 23 page booklet entitled The Golden Compass: Agenda Unmasked to rally readers against the ungodly message within. ‘The film is being sold as an innocent children’s fantasy, but in reality there is nothing innocent about it,’ the League says. ‘The movie is based on a book that was written to promote atheism and denigrate Christianity.’ The Catholic Herald goes further, describing Pullman’s work as ‘worthy of the bonfire’. Far from being offended, the author smiles at the furore. ‘I’m delighted to have brought such excitement into what must be very dull lives,’ he says.

While the consternation should have the usual effect of driving customers to cinemas, what of its book and its author? Were both of them as unexpected successes as they appear?

His Past Materials

Philip Pullman was born in Norwich, England to RAF pilot Alfred Outram and Audrey Merrifield. Forced to travel wherever Outram’s job took them, in 1953 the family was living in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, when the pilot was killed in a plane crash. Young Philip was just seven. Arguably his refusal to blindly accept the existence of faith began with that tragedy. More upheaval lay ahead, however, and the family moved to Australia where they became the Pullmans, after his mother’s new husband.

Pullman’s first brush with literature that inspired and excited him came with his discovery of comics, including Batman and Superman. For him they capture the needs of a demanding audience. ‘Children aren’t interested in irony and cleverness,’ he insists. ‘They want the story, what happened next.’ It was while living with his grandfather in Norfolk, however, after secondary schooling in Harlech, Wales, that Pullman discovered a text that would prove a more controversial influence: John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

In 1968 Pullman received a third class BA from Exeter College, Oxford and soon after moved to London to work in Moss Bros in Covent Garden for 18 months and then at a bookshop off Charing Cross Road. Around the same time he discovered two other long-term influences: the paintings of William Blake and his future wife Judith Speller. But for the short term he returned to Oxford to teach at junior schools and then the Westminster College.

Eight school plays written and directed by Pullman encouraged him that he had a gift for communication, especially in the oral tradition. His first published work, however, was written for adults and leaves the author cold these days. ‘It was published when I was 25 years old and I was very pleased with myself,’ he says. ‘The book was terrible rubbish, though. I’m not even going to tell you what it was called.’ For the record it was 1972’s The Haunted Storm, and far from being a disaster won the New English Library’s Young Writer’s Award. Lady Antonia Fraser, one of the judges, declared Pullman had ‘the real makings of a writer’. The book, published in hardback with dustwrappers by New English Library, will today cost around £2,500 in mint condition. At time of writing, New York’s G Curwen Books offered a fine copy of this ‘impossibly scarce’ volume, signed by Pullman, for $4,000. Australia’s Barossa Vintage Books have a ‘fine’ copy, stickered with the prize notification, for half that.

Galatea followed in 1978 (Gollancz, hardback in wrappers, and offered inscribed by London’s Bookshop on the Heath for £600) but it was with Count Karlstein in 1982 (£900 from Gemini Media, Boulder, USA), written for children, that Pullman hit his stride. Children’s books would be his arena, although he denies consciously making this decision: ‘I don’t write for children. I write books that children read. Some clever adults read them too.’

The first of Pullman’s recurring character series began with 1985’s The Ruby in the Smoke, which introduced the Victorian heroine Sally Lockhart. It is no coincidence the young adventurer reappears in The Shadow in the Plate (1986), The Tiger in the Well (1990) and The Tin Princess (1994). ‘I become fond of a character and see that there’s another story in them,’ Pullman explains. But there is a more practical reason. ‘If I’ve already made up the background and done the reading, I don’t want to waste that work.’ In turn chronologically, the series can be found for £1,250, £400, £100 and £150 in their English editions. On the face of it The Tiger in the Well is worth more in its American edition, being released first by Knopf (1990) and then by Viking in England a year later. However a rogue first imprint of the UK edition, recalled when it was realised it was missing the final paragraph, can fetch ten times this amount. The Bookshop on the Heath offers an exceptional volume replete with humorous letter from Pullman explaining the printing error, for £5,000.

Business is generally slow, however, on non-Dark Materials matters according to Bookmark Children’s Books’ Leonora Excell. ‘We last sold a very good first of Puss in Boots for £25, but have not had much in the way of requests for titles other than the trilogy,’ she says. ‘No doubt any burst of popularity due to the film will also increase the value of his other work for a while. Perhaps it will also encourage people who have only come across the trilogy to appreciate some of his other work.’

Paradise Found

Philip Pullman continued to juggle a full time teaching position with hours spent writing in his garden shed until 1996, maintaining an average output of three handwritten pages a day. His choice of career and its uniform hours, he admits, helped him, but it was not easy. ‘When you work full time the demands on your attention come flying from every direction and unpredictably, and it’s harder to find that regularity that is so necessary.’

He began experimenting with shorter form fairy tales – I was a Rat!, The Firework-Maker’s Daughter, Puss in Boots – but the work which enabled him to hang up his wipeboard cleaner was his longest and certainly most complex yet. Northern Lights, published by David Fickling’s Scholastic in 1995, tells the tale of Lyra, her alethiometer and her battles against unexpected dark forces: she faces alienation and deceit from her mother, her father and, most controversially, from the Church, portrayed as the fascistic Magisterium. It is an uncompromising book from the opening line’s revelation that Lyra has a ‘daemon’ – a physical manifestation in animal form of her soul.

Hopes were not high for the book. If sales had hit earlier books’ figures, Pullman would doubtless have remained in teaching. ‘I thought it would be read by about 500 people at most,’ Pullman admits. How wrong he was. Its true readership is now in the millions, the book won the Carnegie Award – and now, of course, it has been made into a major action movie starring Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman. For the uninitiated, Northern Lights is actually the same book as The Golden Compass, the latter renamed for an American market considered by publisher Knopf to be ready for talking polar bears, multi-universe plotlines, witches and animalistic soul daemons – but not a concept such as ‘Northern Lights’. (The golden item in question is not even a compass; it is an alethiometer, a fortune telling device.) The film, backed by American money, naturally carries the US title.

The book is in very good company with its internationally divisive title. ‘The editor who made that change was also responsible for changing Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which made sense, into Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, which didn’t,’ Pullman says. ‘At the time I didn’t have enough clout to resist.’

Another key change between the Anglo-American editors was its branding. Drawings included in the English versions of the Dark Materials trilogy do not appear in the US equivalents. Knopf were keen to market the books to adults while the UK saw them as children’s first. The third of the set, 2000’s The Amber Spyglass, holds the distinction of being the first children’s book to win the Whitbread Book of the Year. The middle book, The Subtle Knife, was equally lauded.

Far from being an anti religious tract, the His Dark Materials arc was conceived as an antidote to what Pullman considered the poisonous writings of fellow Oxford old boy CS Lewis in his Chronicles of Narnia. ‘I loathe the Narnia books,’ he says. ‘I hate them with a deep and bitter passion, with their view of childhood as a golden age from which sexuality and adulthood are a falling away.’

In fact there are many similarities between the two series – one of which is so overt as to be beyond coincidence. They both start, of course, with a young girl hiding in a wardrobe. Then there are the talking animals, parallel worlds and children thrown into adult scenarios and forced to make ‘grown-up’ moral choices to save a nation. But while Pullman is attacked for promoting atheism, Narnia is a hotbed for Christian propaganda, nowhere more heavy handed than Aslan’s ‘resurrection’.

While His Dark Materials faces problems in America, it has one unlikely ally in Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. In his opinion the books should be taught because they encourage interesting theological thinking.

Northern Heights

As the breakthrough book, Northern Lights remains the most collectable, as long as it ticks all the first impression requirements boxes: ‘point’ on the jacket spine, the price of £12.99 on the jacket and 7-9 Pratt Street on the rear flap. ‘A first in dustwrappers is still extremely hard to find,’ says Leonora Excell, ‘and correspondingly high prices being asked for them. For example Replay Books are advertising a copy for £7,000 mint (not signed), Mungo Books want £3,000 for a signed copy near fine, while Harrington are asking £2,200 signed VG+.’

One issue likely to confuse prospective first hunters is the difference between the stickered and non-stickered Northern Lights. When the book won the 1995 Carnegie Prize, a gold medal sticker was applied – but these books are still first editions. The book was initially a slow seller and only reprinted in September 1997. The copies stickered following the 1996 award ceremony were unsold first editions. It should not be a point of issue for collectors.

A signed and inscribed copy of Northern Lights – without the sticker – is offered through abebooks.com by Adrian Harrington for £4,500 / $9,000. The series’ sequels, however, have less spectacular prices.

‘Again there is a lot of variation in prices for seemingly similar copies of The Subtle Knife,’ Leonora says, ‘anything from around £80 to £1,500! The last copy I definitely know the price of was one sold before summer 2007; it was a near fine first for £125. There are a lot of copies around with signed bookplates, and quite a few signed on ep or title pages.’ At the upper end of the price spectrum, Books Tell You Why are selling through Abebooks a signed fine+ copy for $13,600 / £6,535.

The last book in the series – for now (Pullman has talked of The Book of Dust as being a continuation, probably around 2009) – The Amber Spyglass was the most critically successful and the largest – but also the most heavily printed. ‘Again prices they are being offered at vary,’ Leonora says, ‘but not so wildly as the other two. A decent very good first would probably be around the £60 mark by now, and I have seen mint copies offered at between £100-£175. Currently there are some on offer with signed bookplates at around £300.’

It’s hard to imagine that little more than a decade ago, Philip Pullman was forced to retreat to his garden shed for writing space. Now his success rivals only that of JK Rowling. Like the creator of Harry Potter, it was his ability to find a children’s story that could genuinely be enjoyed by all generations that was the key – along with some sympathetic publishing decisions. ‘Had I been classed an adult-fantasy writer,’ he says, ‘the books would never have flown off the shelves. Nothing succeeds like a book recommended by your children.’

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