Philip Pullman

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 20:08

The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and two and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My castaway this week is a writer. From the seclusion of his garden shed in Oxford, he's poured out stories to delight the world. His main audience has been children, but people of all ages and nations are now attracted by his work. He made his reputation with his books about Sally Lockhart, an unmarried mother and sleuth in Dickensian London. But it's his trilogy His Dark Materials which has put him top of his profession. Witches, airborne jellyfish, gay angels and armoured bears are some of the creatures which inhabit these prize-winning books, loved by critics and millions of readers, but described by the Catholic Herald as worthy of the bonfire. After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world, he says, and I am always the servant of the story that's chosen me to tell it. He is Philip Pullman. We'll come to the church's argument with you later on, Philip, but tell me about being chosen by the story. It sounds rather mystical. You're not the first author to say it. How does it work for you?

Philip Pullman1:29

It does sound rather, if not mystical, then somehow platonic, as if the stories inhabit a different realm and they come to me. I don't really believe that, but it certainly feels like that. It feels as if a story comes to me and and says, Tell me, this is this is your job, this is what you've got to do.

Presenter1:43

But how does it come? Is it just sort of plonk down in front of you and say

Philip Pullman1:45

No, what happens is something snags your mind and you think, Oh, there's a story there. What can I do about that? And then little by little it it sort of emerges out of the fog of unknowing.

Presenter1:55

So the talent is in the recognition, is it? Because I mean there must be lots of bits and pieces you might that might happen past you any day of the week.

Philip Pullman2:02

I think that everybody has these things all the time, but only people who write professionally sort of make a habit of noticing them.

Philip Pullman2:09

The commonest question writers get asked, and you must have heard this numerous times, is where do you get your ideas from? Well, the ideas aren't the problem, they come up all the time. The trick is to to recognize what is likely to be a good story if you keep fiddling with it and putting bits on to it and seeing if they fall off or not.

Presenter2:25

But give me an example.

Philip Pullman2:27

Well, the idea for my story, I Was a Rat, for example, I can't remember what it was, but the idea of hearing a knock on the door and opening it and finding a child there who needs to be looked after. That was the starting point. And somehow the idea of rats was associated with this. I don't know why, you know, there was a sort of cloudiness about it, a sort of oddness, but there were rats in the feeling somewhere. And this is what you have to recognise and not turn the lights on too sharply. If you sort of shine a floodlight all around, see where did that rat idea come from? What did that mean? What is it? Then you'll chase it away and it won't come back. You don't even want to put it down in words yet because that fixes it.

Presenter3:03

Is that a pleasure or a chore? Do you sit there thinking, when is this thing going to explain itself to me?

Philip Pullman3:09

It's both a pleasure and a chore. It's a pleasure because when it comes right there's no pleasure like it. It's a chore because a lot of the time it doesn't come right. You you can't only write when you're feeling inspired or you'd only write on two or three days a year. You have to um a lot of the time you have to sit there and and make it up out of stuff that isn't very clear. So it's both a pleasure and a chore.

Presenter3:25

So it's both a pleasure and a treatment. And you sit there every day doing the same amount, don't you?

Philip Pullman3:30

I've found over the years that it's it's a good way for me to write is to write three pages in manuscript every day. So I that's what I do. It's about a thousand words.

Presenter3:39

Uh

Philip Pullman3:40

Not a lot.

Presenter3:40

Not a lot.

Philip Pullman3:41

Well, it can take quite a lot of time. Sometimes it goes past very quickly, and other other days I'm still there late into the evening. But every day when a book is on stream, I do my three pages. And it soon mounts up. That's the point.

Presenter3:53

Yeah.

Philip Pullman3:53

Tell me about your first record. This is a very pretty piece. I'm I'm a great fan of pretty things, prettiness. And and this is pretty music. There's a lot of French piano music which is very pretty, but this is the prettiest of all, I think.

Presenter5:00

Part of Embateau from Debussy's La Petite Suite, played by Michel Beroff and Jean Philippe Collard. Your trilogy, Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials, has been the work which has brought you international fame and some fortune, I suspect. The final book, The Amber Spy Glass, was Whitbread Book of the Year this year, the first children's book to win that prize.

Presenter5:20

It's fantasy. It's the story of children pitting themselves against the forces of evil in our own and other parallel universes, against some of those fantastic creatures I mentioned in the introduction. But you you say, nevertheless, although it is fantasy, you say you're a realist. I don't understand that.

Philip Pullman5:36

Yes, well I say these things to provoke really and um uh to provoke and annoy. No, what I meant by that really is that I'm trying to be psychologically realistic. The problem with some fantasy not all fantasy but some fantasy is that it doesn't it doesn't seem to be very interested in human psychology, in what it is that makes us feel human, what it's like to grow up, the things that interest me. I wanted to use fantasy as a way of talking about this, as a way of saying something not new, but saying something in a new way.

Presenter6:06

You should explain that your hero and heroine well, the heroine really is Lyra, isn't she? And she is a young girl and she meets a young boy called Will, but in the end they can't be together because they come from separate worlds, from parallel universes, and to be together one of them would have to die because they can't survive forever in their separate universes. And that is why

Presenter6:25

You have to agree with yourself that heaven is here and now, and you can't long for the next thing.

Philip Pullman6:30

That was a way of bringing it home to the reader, yes, the importance of understanding that heaven, if it exists at all, can only exist in the world we live in. It there ain't no elsewhere.

Presenter6:39

Yeah.

Presenter6:41

You can't have been surprised when you upset the church, therefore, because it is it's anti-church the church in the book is called the authority with a capital A.

Philip Pullman6:41

You can't have him surprise.

Philip Pullman6:49

Yeah, well, yeah.

Presenter6:49

Well

Philip Pullman6:52

Well

Presenter6:52

Yeah.

Philip Pullman6:52

Churches are malevolent forces in our world, and have been. If we look at the history of the Christian Church alone, we see

Philip Pullman6:59

Persecutions, hangings, burnings, uh tortures carried out in the name of the the the God of love it's a history of infamy almost without parallel. We don't have to look very far in the world to day to see examples of zealotry entirely fuelled and sustained by religious hatreds of one sort or another. It's a malevolent religion is a malign thing.

Presenter7:20

So what are you saying, that we should just be in control of ourselves and fight evils?

Philip Pullman7:22

The inconsolable

Philip Pullman7:24

Goodness and wickedness both come from the human heart. There is no supernatural origin for these things. We are the origin of good, and we are the origin of wickedness. And there ain't no elsewhere, there is no God.

Presenter7:35

Was it necessary in order to tell this story to essentially well, you kill God, don't you? He dissolves, he blows away in the wind?

Philip Pullman7:44

Yes, with a sigh of the most profound and exhausted relief.

Philip Pullman7:48

He is tired, he is old.

Presenter7:49

And you've had enough of him.

Philip Pullman7:51

He's had enough.

Philip Pullman7:54

Record number two.

Philip Pullman7:56

This is one of the Goldberg variations, Bach's Goldberg variations. I love this work. It's inexhaustibly inventive and refreshing and full of delight and imaginative power. And I like it on the piano, too. The piano seems to be the natural home for the Goldberg variations, although it was of course written for the harpsichord. And the piano version I like the most at the moment is that by Angela Hewitt. This is the first variation.

Presenter9:20

Bach's Goldberg Variation No. One, played by Angela Hewitt. It comes as a surprise after all of that, then, Philip Pullman, to hear that your grandfather was a clergyman, and you lived with him in the rectory in Norfolk for some part of your childhood. I mean, did he put you off organised religion, or something?

Philip Pullman9:36

No, absolutely not. He was the kindest of men, the most delightful companion, story teller.

Philip Pullman9:42

An impatient man in some ways, a brusque man, a Victorian, very much a Victorian, a man of his generation, a man of total rock like certainty in the truths of the religion he professed.

Philip Pullman9:53

But he didn't force it on me, no, not at all.

Presenter9:56

But the storyteller you say so is the way you began to learn your craft.

Philip Pullman9:57

That was infograble.

Philip Pullman10:01

I'm sure it was, yes. He told all sorts of stories, stories that he made up, stories from the Bible, stories about Buffalo Bill, all kinds of stories from from all over the world. And this was the this is the thing I love. I remember and love about him most.

Presenter10:16

And did you tell stories as a little boy?

Philip Pullman10:18

Oh yes, yes. All the time I told stories to my friends, to my brother, to my to myself. I wrote them down. I

Presenter10:23

About what?

Philip Pullman10:25

Oh, creepy things, mostly ghosts and that sort of thing. I love ghost stories.

Presenter10:29

And what did you read? What fed your appetite for narrative as a child?

Philip Pullman10:33

Again, anything and everything, from Noddy to Arthur Ransom to Longfellow's Hiawatha to Rudyard Kipling, everything.

Presenter10:41

And the family travelled around a lot, as I understand it. Your father was in the RAF. He was a pilot, wasn't he?

Philip Pullman10:47

That's right. My father was in the RAF and we moved to what was then called Southern Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, when I was six. Then we moved back to England again and my father was killed in a plane crash and then my mother married again, also an RAF officer, so we moved with him when he was posted to Australia. So we moved about a lot.

Presenter11:05

So there was a lot of excitement of travel, but also this awful drama of your father's dying. It was a drama.

Philip Pullman11:12

It was a drama, but it was off stage, you see. We we didn't know him terribly well, my brother and I,'cause he was always away such a lot, so we we felt that something rather grand and important had happened to us.

Philip Pullman11:21

That we were sort of almost orphaned. Gosh, that was a dr dramatic thing to be. But it happened elsewhere and we were told, you know, by means of a telegram or something. So it was not an immediate shock. You make it sound very dispassionate, your reaction. I don't think it was dispassionate, but maybe I perhaps part of me was already thinking, oh, so this is what it feels like to be half an orphan. That's interesting. I'll make a note of that. I think I probably was.

Presenter11:42

And indeed Lyra in your book is is is an orphan, isn't she? Well, she would appear to be.

Philip Pullman11:46

A lot of the characters in children's books are either orphaned or separated from their parents.

Presenter11:48

Paul.

Presenter11:51

You hear of children wanting to be an orphan or wanting to discover they were adopted. It's a strange why do children want that?

Philip Pullman11:58

Well, part of our growing up involves the awful discovery, usually in our early teen years, that we've been put in the wrong family by mistake.

Philip Pullman12:05

And who are these awful people I have to live with? Surely I don't belong with them. I must be a princess or something.

Presenter12:10

Your mother remarried another RAF man.

Philip Pullman12:12

That's right, yes.

Presenter12:13

And off you set for Australia.

Philip Pullman12:14

Ah, yes, and so we were in Australia by the time I was nine.

Presenter12:17

Very exciting.

Philip Pullman12:18

It was exciting partly because the way you travelled in those days was to go by sea, and travelling across the surface of the earth is always far more exciting than going by air, where you get into a metal tube one end and get out the other, and you don't see anything of the world.

Presenter12:30

So, lots of good snippets of material. Were you consciously storing them away, thinking?

Philip Pullman12:34

Not consciously, but certainly unconsciously. Memori you know, memories of the way the the shape of the waves changes when you go round the Cape of Good Hope, and the colour of the sea changes, and the feeling of the slip ship slowing down as you come towards a you know, a landfall, a port after several days at sea. These things are very um deeply embedded in my

Philip Pullman12:54

Um well, my my my physical memories, you know,'cause you feel seasick and then you don't feel seasick, you feel warm and then you feel cold, you know, those things.

Philip Pullman13:02

Next piece of music.

Philip Pullman13:03

Well, the next piece of music is one that that was a hit when I was in Australia, when I was a boy in Australia. And there was no television then in Australia, so we listened to the radio all the time. And this was one of the one of the one of the tunes that was a big hit around that time. It's Memories Are Made of This.

Speaker 413:17

Sweet, sweet.

Speaker 413:18

Memories you gave of me

Philip Pullman13:20

You can't be

Philip Pullman13:22

The memories you gave of me Take one fresh and tender kiss

Philip Pullman13:31

I had one stolen night of bliss

Philip Pullman13:36

The memories you gain were

Philip Pullman13:38

One girl.

Philip Pullman13:40

One boy, some grief, some joy, men, sweet.

Presenter13:47

Dean Martin, and memories are made of this. So from Australia, Philip Pullman, to Wales and enter into the life of the adolescent Philip Pullman, a very important person named Miss Ennid Jones, your teacher. What did she do for you?

Philip Pullman14:02

And it was a marvellous teacher. She

Philip Pullman14:04

She taught us all the things that were on the exam syllabus. The Shakespeare and the

Philip Pullman14:08

metaphysical poets and all that sort of stuff.

Philip Pullman14:11

And I had an affinity with the subject anyway. I loved reading poetry, I loved writing, and I I could analyse sentences with no difficulty, all that sort of great ground. I loved it, because it was easy, I could do it. But I felt a great sort of kinship with her. She put on a school play every year, and I was Always first and acute audition for that. And I always enjoyed this enormously. So.

Philip Pullman14:34

So there was that. And she encouraged my writing, too. Not that I was doing very much writing in those days. I would write poetry and so on, but we'd do a weekly essay, and once a once a term we'd be allowed to write a story, which was a great treat.

Presenter14:44

Petitia redraws out to the class.

Philip Pullman14:46

Uh yeah.

Presenter14:47

I'm interested though that you liked grammar. There is a kind of logic and a sympathy, an instinctive sympathy, it seems to me, in you with things technical. I'm thinking now about your your book Clockwork, and again you describe the kind of winding up of a clock and all the little pieces that go towards making clockwork, don't you? That's an interesting point.

Philip Pullman15:05

That's an interesting point. That's very interesting. Yes, you're quite right. I do like seeing how things work. With proper clocks you can take them apart and see what makes them tick, see how they work. And this bit connects to that bit. And I suppose constructing a story is something like that. When you do it conscious, when you have to th come to the conscious fitting together bit.

Philip Pullman15:21

And the pleasure when you see, Oh, yes, if I put the bit in there, and then a little later on it can do that, and that'll happen. Oh, that's wonderful. There's a real delight, a real sort of buzz from that.

Speaker 415:27

Okay.

Philip Pullman15:31

I suppose the greatest example of this is in the story of Oedipus.

Philip Pullman15:35

Hell bent on discovering who it was that had killed his father, and then discovering to his horror that it's him.

Presenter15:40

And he was never going to avoid it.

Philip Pullman15:42

That's right.

Presenter15:43

Does that mean if there's an inevitability, as we say to that unwinding, when you're doing it, and we've said that you write, you know, so much per day, no more, no less?

Presenter15:52

Does it mean you don't suffer from writer's block? It just flows.

Philip Pullman15:56

Well, this business about writers' block I don't know, does d d

Philip Pullman16:00

Do plumbers get plumbers block?

Philip Pullman16:02

Would you get to the door? Went to the doctor and say, Oh, doctor, I'm in terrible pain. He said, I can't treat you today. I've got doctor's block.

Presenter16:03

You get up to the doctor and say

Philip Pullman16:09

There's no such thing as writer's block. There are times when it's difficult to write, and times when it's easy to write but what you have to do is do the same amount every day, no matter whether it's difficult or easy.

Philip Pullman16:19

And it'll mount up. Eventually the difficulties will disappear, and it'll become easy again.

Presenter16:23

But isn't there don't you also have a little bit of a superstition about it? Don't you always write a sentence the night before that'll get you started the next morning, just in case you get hit the block?

Philip Pullman16:33

Uh you have to cover all the bases.

Presenter16:37

They call number four.

Philip Pullman16:39

Oh yes, well this is uh this is a lovely example of a kind of music I grew to love when I was uh visiting Africa in in when I was about twenty years old. My my peripatetic parents were living in Uganda at the time.

Philip Pullman16:52

And I spent a couple of holidays with them and loved the music that was on the radio and in the clubs. It was music a lot of it um came from Zahir.

Philip Pullman17:01

And a lot of that music was influenced in turn by Latin American music. And this is uh an example of the top orchestra from Zaed, the Orchestra Oque Jazz, playing a song called Bolingo ya bougie.

Speaker 417:16

I'm calling by the hire of a pumpkin side.

Speaker 417:19

I'm not sure if I can do it.

Speaker 417:29

Yangoli Bala Oyo Kokumi Sara

Speaker 417:32

Zakande jali sebuling go ya bouji. Soki vi maidi tokotala e pae.

Presenter17:40

Franco and the Orchestra OK Jazz playing Bolingo Yabuji. Um you went to Oxford, Philip, Exeter College, to read English. Um you only got a third, and uh you got only a third, and you've said that uh it was an absolutely useless waste of time. Why was that?

Philip Pullman17:58

Well, it was rather harsh, perhaps, perhaps I shouldn't have put it quite as harshly as that.

Philip Pullman18:02

What I now realize I should have done was to go to art school.

Philip Pullman18:05

and do something physical with my hands, making things. But the the way to that was had been barred years before because of the you know, the way the school time table works. If you're clever you had to do Latin and not art, so I couldn't do art from

Presenter18:18

And if you wanted to get into Oxford you had to have less.

Philip Pullman18:20

All that sort of stuff, yes. I would r I would I I I wish now that I'd had the chance to go to art school and learn to draw properly, because that's what I would really have loved to do.

Presenter18:29

But you're a published artist in that you've illustrated your own books.

Philip Pullman18:32

Yes, I've s craftily managed to sneak some of my illustrations into

Presenter18:35

So you could you as easily have been an illustrator, do you think?

Philip Pullman18:38

It it's something which I would l love to do. I don't know if I've got the talent for it, but it it would have been lovely to find out.

Presenter18:45

You married and then you trained to be a teacher. Your wife was a teacher and obviously you needed to provide for the family and you had two boys.

Philip Pullman18:48

Okay.

Presenter18:52

Where was this ambition to write them? Because you said that you w intended to be a writer from um when you were six years old.

Philip Pullman18:59

I don't think I intended to be a writer. I intended to write.

Presenter19:02

Nice.

Philip Pullman19:02

So being a writer is not the same thing as writing.

Presenter19:05

You mean being a published writer?

Philip Pullman19:07

No, I wanted to write, I wanted to tell stories. That's the important thing.

Presenter19:10

So you'd never really intended to make your living by it?

Philip Pullman19:14

I hoped that I might be able to.

Presenter19:15

Might be able to. Okay. And what was the first novel you wrote, the first full length? When did you write it and what was it?

Philip Pullman19:21

Yeah.

Philip Pullman19:21

Well I began to write it the day after I finished my final exams at Oxford, and I discovered in the first morning that either they'd left something fundamental out of the English course I'd just done, or else I hadn't been paying attention. It's a matter of point of view, it's a matter of who's telling the story and where it's coming from. In the words of David Mammet, the film director, it's the question where do I put the camera?

Philip Pullman19:42

It's a fundamental question, a very interesting and important question. And somehow I hadn't noticed that they were talking about that, if they did, in my A level English degree at Oxford. I'd missed it out.

Presenter19:53

Why don't you notice it the morning after your final

Philip Pullman19:53

Why did you not

Philip Pullman19:55

Because I was doing it.

Philip Pullman19:56

Because when you tell a story you have to decide where you're telling it from.

Philip Pullman19:59

And the actual doing of it was the that was the first big lesson I learned. So that was the fer I I I went on to complete that novel and it was absolutely dreadful and it wasn't published and I wrote a number of other things that were dreadful but I was learning all the time, you see.

Philip Pullman20:12

learning not least that if you want to finish something you have to work at it steadily and accumulate the pages at a regular rate.

Presenter20:18

And when did you discover that fantasy was really the right kind of medium for what you had to say or the story you had to tell?

Presenter20:27

We're quite

Presenter20:28

Quite recently.

Philip Pullman20:29

Uh

Philip Pullman20:29

I had always tried to be realistic, tried to describe the real world. But I discovered in Northern Lights a story that wouldn't work if I did that. It had to be in a different world, and it had to have elements of the fantastical in it. And to my surprise and not no little embarrassment, I discovered that I was

Philip Pullman20:46

Enjoying this enormously. I was rather good at it. And when did you discover that it was children that you should be writing for? Oh, that was much more easy to see. When I was teaching,

Philip Pullman20:57

I started writing plays to put on at school. I was teaching in a middle school and I was teaching children not quite old enough to do Shakespeare, you know, in a really interesting way. So I had to write the plays that I put on. And I I've discovered I loved it. I loved telling stories that both children and their parents would enjoy. You've got a mixed audience. And I love telling a story to this mixed audience. And that's what I've really enjoyed most ever since. There's no feeling quite like it.

Speaker 221:07

I might

Philip Pullman21:21

It's so intoxicating and so pleasurable that I

Philip Pullman21:24

I I couldn't stop even if I had to.

Presenter21:27

Pickwood number five.

Philip Pullman21:28

Jazz has always been important to me. I've loved jazz ever since I was a boy and I heard what was that record that was a big hit, then Dave Brubeck's Take Five. Well that that led me to all sorts of other things.

Philip Pullman21:41

And out of the

Philip Pullman21:43

The the great spectrum of jazz, and you could easily fill a whole bragging with just jazz. This is a piece I I I'm very fond of because I I bought the record when I was young and I played it till it was scratched and hardly hardly listened to a bull at all.

Speaker 421:55

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm,

Presenter22:51

I'll remember April, played by Lee Konitz with the Jerry Mulligan Quartet. Your single most compelling idea, I think, in the trilogy, Philip, is that all human beings have these things called demons. And they're not demons with an E, they're demons with a diphthong, an AE. Why why has it got a diphthong there?

Philip Pullman23:09

When I first thought of the Demon it was one of those sort of moments when you're you've been sitting there for months and nothing's happened and it's gone nowhere, and suddenly I found myself writing the words Lyra and her demon, and I didn't know she had a demon until then, and it was spelt D A E in joined together with that ligature.

Philip Pullman23:26

M-O-N. So I had to write the rest of the chapter to see what they were doing and what this demon was, and then I realized what an idea I'd got. It was the best idea I ever had, I think.

Presenter23:36

What is I mean is it the soul outer ego?

Philip Pullman23:36

Yeah.

Philip Pullman23:39

It's it's sort of none of those things and all of them. It's W it has the form of an animal.

Presenter23:43

Well it has

Philip Pullman23:45

And it's you, but it's it's part of you that's external, and it's born with you and it dies with you, and it's usually of the opposite sex.

Philip Pullman23:53

And the interesting thing about demons, or the thing that, when I realized it, showed me how rich the idea was, is this, that children's demons can change shape from moment to moment. And at adolescence they sort of achieve a fixed form and keep that for the rest of your life. So adults would have a in Lyra's world would all have a demon and it would be a snake or a cat or whatever it might be. So I'm sure you've been asked this before. What are you? Probably something like a magpie or a jackdaw, one of these birds that hang about the place um picking up shiny bits of stuff.

Presenter24:24

But there's something slightly worrying about that image, isn't there? Something sort of very slightly dark and brooding about that image. I wonder if.

Presenter24:32

If there isn't something dark and brooding about you somewhere.

Philip Pullman24:37

Yes, well, uh m melancholy, or melancholia, is a visitor that recurs from time to time. The remedy for it, as Dr Johnson, that great melancholic, said, is if you are you know, if you are solitary, be not idle, and if you are idle, be not solitary.

Presenter24:52

So you keep busy.

Philip Pullman24:53

Keep busy and keep your friendships intact.

Presenter24:55

Churning out a thousand words a day. I and how much has that informed what you've told me you believe, you know, that you can have heaven here on earth by being decent, honest, truthful, and

Philip Pullman25:07

And active and busy. That's the point, yes. If you just fritter your life away, you're not doing much good.

Philip Pullman25:14

As Lyra discovers in the World of the Dead and the Amber Spyglass the ghosts of the children there when she visits the World of the Dead beg her to tell them a story. And she tells them as true a story as she can think of. And then she discovers to her astonishment that the harpies who guard the ghosts in this terrifying place have also been listening. And the harpies say that if you go down to the World of the Dead and tell them the true story of your life

Philip Pullman25:38

Then they will guide you to the way out where you're

Philip Pullman25:41

Your ghost can vanish into the world again.

Philip Pullman25:44

But if you go down there without a story to tell,

Philip Pullman25:47

They won't do that, so you'll be there forever. So the only way to get out of the world of the dead

Philip Pullman25:52

is to live this life as fully as you can and achieve.

Philip Pullman25:55

What you can do, and end up with a story to tell. Experience things, live life.

Philip Pullman25:59

Number six.

Philip Pullman26:01

One of the uh the ways in which I think of myself, when I ever do, is as a European. I feel profoundly and solidly European. And of the great things that Europe has discovered and invented and given to the world, such as the scientific method and parliamentary democracy, one of the greatest is the Symphony Orchestra.

Philip Pullman26:18

And right at the very heart of the repertoire of the symphony orchestra is Beethoven, this great mountain.

Philip Pullman26:24

And I couldn't select eight records for a desert island without having something by Beethoven, so this is the opening of the fifth symphony.

Presenter27:30

The opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, played by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Carlos Kleiber. Can you explain, Philip Pullman, the new popularity of fantasy books? I mean, there's been Harry Potter, of course, and there's yours, and more, and this kind of univers universality of its appeal. Why suddenly, again, are we hungry for fantasy?

Philip Pullman27:51

I'm not sure and I'm not sure that it's th th suddenly happened again. I think it was always there, but sort of underground perhaps.

Presenter27:58

But it's come to the fore now.

Philip Pullman27:59

It's come to the fore now, partly because Harry Potter is s such a huge and universal success and maybe my books have had something to do with it as well.

Presenter28:08

And they're all being translated into films. We've had Harry Potter. We've had, of course, Lord of the Rings. What about yours?

Philip Pullman28:13

Goodbye.

Philip Pullman28:14

Well, there are plans to make it into a film or films.

Presenter28:17

You w do they worry you, these clans?

Presenter28:20

You're gonna brood over them like a parent.

Philip Pullman28:22

Absolutely not. No. I think it's in good hands, and I will watch it from a distance with um

Philip Pullman28:28

Benevolent interest

Presenter28:29

Oh, really, you don't feel proprietorial at all about it?

Philip Pullman28:31

Not at all. No, it's I'm not a filmmaker. I'm not a I'm not a screenwriter. I'm not a director. I'm a novelist.

Presenter28:37

Yeah, but that's a very unemotional line to take, isn't it? I mean, usually people feel, well, you know, say if they cast come but say if they cast Dawn French as a liar or something, I don't know.

Philip Pullman28:37

Yeah, yeah.

Presenter28:46

r the wrong style of figure, as it were.

Philip Pullman28:49

Doan French is a very fine actress, and I'm sure she could make a very good fist at playing Lyra.

Presenter28:52

Who would you really like to have play Lara?

Philip Pullman28:54

If they do make a film, it won't happen for another two or three years, at least, and so the child who would be the right age to play Lyra then is very young now and nobody knows who she is.

Presenter29:03

So you'll stick to just the writing. What are you writing now?

Philip Pullman29:06

Alright.

Presenter29:07

I'm writing another.

Philip Pullman29:07

I'm writing another of the books of the sort I call fairy tales, such as Clockwork and I Was a Rat, and another one called The Firework Maker's Daughter, of which I'm very fond. It's uh th it's about a hundred, a hundred and twenty pages, that sort of length. I call them fairy tales.

Presenter29:22

But will you return to Lyra and Will? Will they find each other again in another world where they can be together?

Philip Pullman29:27

I shall return to the world of Lyra.

Philip Pullman29:30

Because there are a lot of stories left in that world that I want to tell.

Philip Pullman29:33

I think that particular story has come to an end, but we may see the characters again.

Philip Pullman29:38

Make one number seven.

Philip Pullman29:39

One of my great musical passions is the piano music of Nikolai Metna, who becomes visible for a while and then disappears again and is forgotten and then surfaces again when another pianist gets hold of his work and becomes passionate about it and plays it all. He was a contemporary of Rachmaninoff and a wonderful pianist and a most marvellous composer. I love his music because it is so full of melody.

Philip Pullman30:02

It's rich, it's complicated music. I can't begin to describe it in technical terms or follow it, although I try to on the uh on on the on the page of music to see what's going on. But it's

Philip Pullman30:14

I just love the sound it makes, the sound world he inhabits.

Presenter31:18

Part of Sonata Reminiscenza in A minor by Nikolai Mitner, played by Emil Gillels.

Presenter31:25

I have a hunch, Philip Pullman, that you'd be all right on this desert island. That there's uh you know, you're quite a practical chap, really, aren't you? I see you've got plasters on your fingers. You've been hacking away at something.

Philip Pullman31:36

Yes, I secateured my finger the other day. Uh yes, I do like making things and I'd be quite happy pulling branches about and putting stones together to make walls and so and I'd quite enjoy that. I would miss human company, that's the most awful thing there.

Presenter31:49

But could you do you think you'd write or draw? Could you find something to scrape away? Oh, I'd have to.

Philip Pullman31:53

Oh, I have to, yes.

Presenter31:54

On a bit of old bark or something.

Philip Pullman31:55

Yeah, so I'd have to do something like that.

Presenter31:57

What about spiritually? I mean, from what you said, um, you'd have to believe it was heaven, wouldn't you?

Presenter32:03

Where you were?

Philip Pullman32:04

That's where I am, or that's where I'd be. I'd have to make it as as uh as good as I could.

Presenter32:09

Do you think you could, or do you think you just give up and descend to that?

Philip Pullman32:09

Guys

Presenter32:13

ghastly, dead leaf rustling place that you describe.

Philip Pullman32:17

Oh, I hope I'd keep at it. In the words of Doctor Johnson I quoted before, if you are solitary, be not idle, I'd have to be active all the time.

Presenter32:24

Could you do that?

Philip Pullman32:25

Oh yes, I think so.

Presenter32:26

Last piece of music.

Philip Pullman32:27

Uh

Philip Pullman32:28

The final piece of music is is by Berlioz, a character I've always enjoyed. His memoirs are the most terrific yarn.

Philip Pullman32:36

Full of wild exaggeration and romantic exuberance and energy, and this is from the Overture Les Franjouge.

Presenter33:41

Part of Berlio's Les Franjouge, played by the London Classical Players, conducted by Roger Norrington. Now, if you could only take one of those eight, Philip, which one would you take?

Philip Pullman33:51

Because I love it so much, and because it's so intimate, I would take the Metna, the Sonata Reminicienza. It would be it would be a good companion for me.

Presenter34:00

Hmm.

Presenter34:02

What about your book? There's the complete works of Shakespeare, the Bible, which presumably you don't want?

Philip Pullman34:07

Oh, the Bible's full of good stuff. There are some wonderful yarns in the Bible, and there's a lot of wisdom, too, in the Book of Proverbs and elsewhere, so I wouldn't at all be reluctant to have the Bible with me.

Philip Pullman34:16

But as for another book, it would have to be the greatest novel I've ever read, which is Proust's great work.

Philip Pullman34:23

Because there's so much in it. It's so full of life. It's funny, it's tragic, it's ironic, it's inexhaustible.

Philip Pullman34:31

That's the one. And your luxury.

Philip Pullman34:35

My luxury would really be would have to be a painting. It's a painting by the greatest painter of still life, Chardin. It's called The Jar of Apricots, and it's

Philip Pullman34:44

One of his delightful still lifes of little ordinary sort of every day things that you see in a kitchen, and apart from the beauty of the way the paint is applied and the exquisite way the forms are arranged,

Philip Pullman34:54

It's full of little intriguing things. There's a parcel there which is wrapped in paper and string. There's a loaf of bread and a knife. And there's a delicate little porcelain cup, into which somebody has just poured perhaps coffee or chocolate or something, because there's a drift of steam coming off the top. And I'd like to imagine that whoever poured that would be

Philip Pullman35:10

just out of the picture, and perhaps bringing a chair for me to sit on or something, to come and talk. So it it's it's a pic picture that suggests human companionship without limiting it to one face. So I could imagine anyone I wanted to sitting down with me to drink this.

Philip Pullman35:23

and enjoying the apricots.

Presenter35:25

Philip Pullman, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Philip Pullman35:29

Thank you very much.

Speaker 235:37

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.