Philip Pullman Isn't Done Building New Worlds

Philip Pullman Isn't Done Building New Worlds

- Dan Stewart

WHEN PHILIP PULLMAN WAS 10 YEARS OLD, HE witnessed a vision that has stayed with him ever since. The year was 1956, and he was living in South Australia, where his stepfather was a pilot with Britain’s Royal Air Force. The River Murray floods that year had left huge parts of the region underwater, and he remembers being driven out to see it. “It was astonishing,” the 70-year-old British author says now. “It was an immense mass, as wide as the sea, of gray water whipped up by a cold wind. The power of it. It was an impression that never left me.”

It’s this memory that inspired the flood at the center of La Belle Sauvage, the first volume of the Book of Dust, Pullman’s new trilogy set in the universe of his fantasy series His Dark Materials. Released between 1995 and 2000, the three novels that launched the franchise entered the canon of young-adult fiction and, alongside the Harry Potter series, stands as an early example of the cross-generational appeal of the genre. In 2003, Pullman’s fellow Brits voted the entire trilogy their third favorite book of all time, after The Lord of the Rings and Pride and Prejudice.

His Dark Materials is mostly set in a parallel universe where the supernatural is everyday; ageless witches exist alongside warrior polar bears; and every human has a “daemon,” a kind of spirit animal with which it shares a soul. The books also wrestle with weighty metaphysical themes, influenced by the poetry of William Blake and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The villains are the forces of organized religion, and the heroes seek to challenge and overturn the order of the monotheistic universe. The final book ends with Pullman’s heroine, Lyra, unwittingly restaging the fall of man and setting out to create a “Republic of Heaven,” a principled democracy rather than a dictatorship under the authority of God.