Sir Philip Pullman: fantasy can be unsatisfactory

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? the History Bureau Putin and the Apartment Bombs listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts with the European Athletics Championships the Men's FIFA World Cup and the Commonwealth Games all taking place 2026 is shaping up to be a terrific year for global sport and the More Than The Score podcast will be following all the action bringing you interviews with sports stars and exploring the stories beyond the score sheets with the BBC's expert sports journalists More Than The Score from the BBC World Service.

1:05Listen now. Search for More Than The Score wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

1:31There have been so many disagreements between me and my family. Putting on a show, that is what it means to be Lady Gaga. Only the things that you can't solve with government and private sector is where you bring philanthropy in. There's no place in the world where women are equal. Every generation, every generation has to fight to maintain democracy. For this interview, I met British author Sir Philip Pullman at his home in Oxford. He's best known for writing the award-winning His Dark Materials, a series of novels beloved by children and adults alike all over the world. The books follow the adventures of the two main characters, Lyra and Will, across a series of parallel universes where Pullman blends magical storytelling with physics, philosophy and theology.

2:23Pullman was a part-time English lecturer when the first instalment in the series was published 30 years ago. Tens of millions of copies have been sold across multiple continents, and the stories have been translated into 40 languages. The commercial and critical success spawned a follow-up series, The Book of Dust, which came out nearly a decade ago. The 79-year-old has now picked up his pen to publish the latest and final instalment, The Rose Field. Although loved all over the world, the stories have also attracted controversy for their criticism of religion. Pullman, who once described himself as a Church of England atheist, is outspoken on a number of modern-day issues, including politics, free speech and indeed faith.

3:10There is so much to think about in your books and so many wonderful creations. The alethiometer, the conveyor of truth, you created that before the modern era of fake news. But do you worry now about truth, about how we can tell fact from fiction, lies even? Since the coming of the internet and social media and so on, that has made truth harder to grasp, I think, because the authorities we used to turn to are now either not used at all, like dictionaries and encyclopedias, or mocked as being purveyors of something that's patriarchal, it's old-fashioned, it's whatever. So what do you know? Who do we believe?

3:53that's difficult. That's difficult for people to get. It's difficult for people to tell, it's difficult for people to hear that they've been fooled. We have been fooled. We are being fooled daily.

4:09Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Sir Philip Pullman. Your book, The Northern Lights, was published in 1995. More than 30 years on, we're seeing the publication of The Rose Field. has it been hard to say goodbye? In a way, yes, because you know the characters, they're old friends there. They've been with you all that time. I shall miss them a little bit, I think, but I can always make up new stories if I want to, if I have the patience. In another way, it's nice to have the road clear ahead so I can do something else. Yes, I mean, 49 million copies sold of those books so far.

4:49Presumably that number is only going to go up. Why do you think they've resonated so much? Well, if I knew why, I would have written them 30 years before I did. I'm interested in how you describe this series, because it's got mythical creatures, it's got travel between worlds, it's got demons. People will remember that every human has one of these creatures. It's a sort of inner self manifesting as a real animal. There's the alethiometer that can tell the truth, but you don't describe them as fantasy. Why not? A lot of fantasy, I mean, I haven't read every fantasy book, but a lot of the fantasy that I have read is unsatisfactory for me because it's not interested in psychology.

5:32It's not interested in how people think or feel. It's all about other planets and other ages and the doom sword of Gongolblath or something, and you've got to find the doom sword before you can defeat the evil sorcerer. It's mechanical. You know, you can write a fantasy just by turning a lot of wheels. That doesn't interest me because I'm interested in people and the way they grow and the way they feel things, the way they see things. Why do we see things differently? Why do I see things in a very different way from someone my age probably in America who's brought up as a strict Southern Baptist?

6:06Why don't we see the same things in the same way? That's what interests me. What's the answer? Well, it's partly curiosity. I see things the way I do because I've always been curious and inquisitive and nosy, if you like, but interested in the way things are and could be. That's the big virtue, I think, laying claim to virtue. A dangerous thing to do. Well, Philip, you certainly explore very profound themes in all your books and this book. You know, the evils. I don't know if that's too strong of organized religion. religion. Is that how you view religion, as dogmatic or worse? It's how I view political religion.

6:49Religious people feel a close connection between themselves and the universe or God or whatever they call it. That's fine. No arguments with that at all. The arguments I have are with people in power who use religion to make other people do things. God says you must not do this so stop doing that I'll put you in jail that sort of attitude but also the attitude from the church itself and we've seen it for 2000 years behaving badly when it gets into power you're believing the wrong thing burn him to death you're believing the wrong thing put him in jail convert yourself or I'll cut your head off people with power do that and religion gives them a sense of extra certainty when they do that because they believe that they're fulfilling the will of God.

7:38They're not, of course, but they believe they are, and that gives them a great sort of sense of purpose and strength. But I find interesting, too, the states, the nations we've seen that are explicitly atheist. Soviet Russia, a more perfect example of a religious society you couldn't find. They have a holy book, which is the works of Marx. They have a prophet, who was Karl Marx himself. They have a whole system of betrayal, denunciation, just as the church did in Venice. If you want to denounce someone in Venice, you put a little slip with their name on in the special post box in the Doge's Palace.

8:14Just the same in Soviet Russia. My neighbour's been saying bourgeois things. And so on. And also, and this is very important, the sense of direction in history. The direction in the church is you behave well and you go to heaven. That's what we're all aiming for, the kingdom of heaven. In Soviet Russia, the direction was the dictatorship of the pluritariet. When we've got that, everyone will be happy. There'll be blessings and plenty for everyone. But if you go against that, if you betray us, we'll punish you. So the idea of a sort of teleological view of history belongs both to the church and to the states that are not believers but who behave like them.

8:56Since you started writing, I wonder what your sense is of how the influence of religion in the real world has shifted because I'm thinking here in recent times we've got the first female Archbishop of Canterbury, we've got Pope Francis in office. Does it feel like a shifting time, a more liberal time in that regard? Yes, that's an interesting one. I'm glad we've got a female Archbishop. I think she's a good woman and she'll do a lot of good. I'm glad to see that. The South American Pope, well, we've now got a North American Pope and it depends on how he behaves. I don't know, these things don't matter very much actually they're not fundamental what's fundamental is the way people behave to each other, to one another whether we're fundamentally selfish or fundamentally kind and we can choose to be either we don't have to be bad it's not our nature forcing us to be bad some people have it that it is some people are naturally horrible and evil and if you don't do them first they'll do you That's the sort of thinking that underlies the Trumpian attitude to things.

10:04People are all bad. Look at these people coming through over our borders. They're rapists and murderers. Well, they're not. Some people see it like that. And that's a bad way to be for all of us. And in the book, one of the things you're exploring is imagination. Is imagination more than make-believe? We know that children have it and we think we often lose it as adults. It all depends on what you think the imagination is. A lot of people think that it's just the power of making things up. It's just daydreaming or it's just taking two bits of stuff and putting them together in the equal theatre.

10:38Like taking a horse and a man and you put them together. Oh, you made a centaur. Aren't you clever? Well, I don't see imagination like that at all. I think imagination is a form of perception. And this is where the rose field comes in. You see, I think that everything in the world, books, carpets, furniture, people, flowers, trees, stars, the sun, the sky, buildings, everything is surrounded by a sort of field. Now we know about the idea of fields because we know about the gravitational field that holds everything to the earth. We know about the electromagnetic field, which works in that particular way.

11:14And we've now been told about the Higgs field, which permeates everything and which makes things able to have mass. So the idea of field isn't strange to us. But what I call the rose field is a sort of field in which things exist that you can only see with your imagination they're there but you can't see them if you don't imagine them for example ghosts wishes hopes memories associations similarities likenesses that sort of thing sort of tenuous and wispy things are not tenuous and wispy really they're hard and solid and you can see them if you imagine them So I think, together with, well, the Romantic poets, for one thing, and German philosophers too many and too deep for me to read, but have had this view of the imagination, and I think it makes sense.

12:03To me, the imagination is what helps you see things that are there in the rose field. And the rose field is a field that encompasses everything, includes everything, especially these things that you can't necessarily weigh or measure or analysed chemically, but which are there nonetheless, such as love, such as fear, such as hope, such as the likeness of that furry thing to a caterpillar, and so on. All these things that belong in the rose field and are seen by the imagination. That's what I believe. That's what I've discovered. And my description provides an easy get-out for scientists who are fixated on the physical.

12:44Oh, it's just imagination, that's what he's saying. It's only imagination, it doesn't matter, it's only made up. Well, I don't mean that at all. Yes, it's imagination, but imagination is a perception. Another thing that many creators are worried about might be the death of things is artificial intelligence. And imagination obviously creates worlds for books. It discovers, sees worlds. Sees worlds, discovers worlds, boundless human creativity. when it comes to AI, which obviously feels unstoppable and has many benefits. There's a bit in your book where one of the characters says many human beings move between two kingdoms, the outer and the inner, and the inner is the imagination.

13:23And that did prompt me to think about AI, that humans have imagination, which AI doesn't. And is that something that we can hold on to? Is that a parallel you would draw, but also something that gives us hope that AI isn't going to take over our world in the way that we worry? Yes, AI is very interesting, and I watch its developments that are reported with fascination and a bit of anxiety. Of course, it has no imagination. It has no power to see the rose field. You can't measure the rose field. You can't put it onto a spectrum and say, yes, it's at 0.703. You can't do that with those things. And of course, AI doesn't understand that.

14:03I'm not worried about AI because it's a big fad at the moment, just as dot-com things were a few years ago. A lot of them fell down flat because they didn't work after all. I don't think AI is going to work in the way people hope it. It will. And I'm not particularly worried about it.

14:21You're listening to the interview from the BBC World Service. People shaping our world from all over the world. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

15:03With the European Athletics Championships, the Men's FIFA World Cup and the Commonwealth Games all taking place, 2026 is shaping up to be a terrific year for global sport. And the More Than The Score podcast will be following all the action, bringing you interviews with sports stars and exploring the stories beyond the score sheets with the BBC's expert sports journalists. More Than The Score from the BBC World Service. Listen now. Search for More Than The Score wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

15:59basis for Lyra's Oxford home in the early stories. He's open and full of insights into his writing, where he gets his inspiration and his views on the world. And as you'll hear, Pullman's never been shy of sharing his opinions. Okay, let's return to my conversation with Sir Philip Pullman. And I want to get more of a sense of you and how you became this incredible writer of these books that are so loved around the world, your own influences? When you were a child, do you look back and think there were influences on you, experiences you had as a child that meant you were destined to become a novelist, somewhere where your creativity came from?

16:41Is it innate? No. I am an existentialist, which means that existence precedes essence as far as I'm concerned. Nobody is essentially anything. I started to write because I like stories. I liked stories because I'd been read stories. I had been taught to read so I could read myself stories. I liked words because I liked the sound of poems and I remembered them when I'd heard them. I was at home in this sort of stuff. Just as if I were an engineer, I'd be at home with cogs and levers and oil and stuff like that. It would be somewhere where I was at home, where my hands were at home. Well, my hands and my head and my ears are at home with words.

17:23so it was likely that if I worked at them I might be able to do something interesting I don't think there was destiny in it and what about your childhood would you tell me a bit about your childhood because I know you moved around a lot and did that impact you creatively do you think uh yeah it must have done before I was 11 we'd moved we'd gone to South Africa and back by sea. We'd gone to Australia and back by sea. And I remember things that young people traveling now don't experience. You get in a tube now at the airport after a lot of hassle with going through the passport and the luggage and all that stuff.

18:06And it's a bore. And you get on a plane and you sort of sit there for hours. It's an awful experience flying now. I hate it. but going somewhere by sea is much more exciting. You get a much fuller, deeper sense of how big the world is. It takes you a long time to go all the way around the world, end up in Australia. And what the sea is like, and what the sea is like around this country is rather grey and rather cold. And even further you go south, the bluer it gets and the warmer it gets. And you go even further south, and the shape of the sea changes. Instead of doing that all day long, And what you get used to, it starts doing that, which is not so comfortable.

18:46And that's horrible for a few days. But you learn all these things physically in your body. And that's where you remember them. And so your Rosefield perception of that includes, of the sea, includes all those things. So that must have helped. But of course I was reading as well. I was reading comics and loving comics. I was reading all the things that children normally read. Biggles and the Famous Five. stuff like that, but also poetry. I read a lot of higher author when I was about nine or ten, partly because I love the da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da rhythm of it, and because the stories, the stories are well told.

19:28The pictures it brought to mind were very vivid and moving in some cases. So I did read a lot, yeah. Perhaps this is a ridiculous question to ask an author. Some people have answers, some people don't. But with this book, The Rose Field, Do you want people to take messages away from it? Is it just a rollicking story? When you set out to write a book, are you thinking about the messages you're sending to the people who read it? No, it's not a message. It's not a message. I'd like people to think about what I say about imagination. I'd like people to try visualising things as being surrounded by all the things they suggest, by the shadows and dreams and phantoms and whispers and so on.

20:11because that's where the Rose Field is and what it contains. But it's not a book of instructions. It's not a self-help book, nothing of the sort. Mainly it's a story. You want to know what happens next. You absolutely do. You want to turn every page and keep reading. That's the point of a book, I suppose. A good book, anyway. But there is so much to think about in your books. There's so many wonderful creations. We were talking about demons, but also the alethiometer, the conveyor of truth. You created that before the modern era of fake news. But do you worry now about truth, about how we can tell fact from fiction, lies even?

20:48Yes, that is very much with us at the moment. It's since really about 30 years ago, with the coming of the internet and Twitter and social media and so on. That has made truth harder to grasp, I think. because the authorities we used to turn to are now either not used at all, like dictionaries and encyclopedias, or mocked as being purveyors of something that's patriarchal, it's old-fashioned, it's imperialist, it's this, it's that, it's Marxist, it's whatever. So what do you know? Who do we believe? That's difficult. That's difficult for people to get. It's difficult for people to tell, it's difficult for people to hear that they've been fooled.

21:32People don't like being fooled and don't like being told that they've been fooled because it means that they're fools. Nevertheless, we have been fooled. We are being fooled daily. We were talking earlier about how much you read as a child. And when you started writing these books, it was a very different time. It was the nascent days of the internet. There was no social media, no algorithms ruling our lives. And perhaps most crucially, kids were still reading. And yet now we've got a study, a recent study by the National Literacy Trust that says only one in three children aged 8 to 18 enjoy reading in their free time.

22:08And another that suggests a quarter of white working class boys don't read outside school. It's a stupid question to ask an author. Does it worry you? But how shocked are you by that and what can we do about it? I'm not surprised. I'm not shocked. I'm just saddened, really. But the reason people don't read is that they haven't been surrounded by other people who read. The best way to become a reader is to be born into a family of readers. It's this childhood thing. It's a young childhood business. You need, every child needs someone to bring them up, who will sit them on their lap and do the nursery rhymes and all that sort of stuff, tell them stories, read them stories, share books, looking at the pictures.

22:53Every child needs that. It's the most powerful, most important, most profound and fundamental thing. And that's what they're not getting because people are born into families who don't have the book reading habit, who haven't any books themselves, who don't know where the library is, and the library might probably have been closed anyway, and teachers who haven't got the time to do that sort of thing. But I think there'll be parents listening to this thinking, I've done all that, my child did read but as soon as they got a phone and I'm speaking from experience the power of the phone is so strong and the fights that you have to fight to get off the phone the algorithm is so strong they lose that love of reading or at least they seem to Yeah, we've invented a lot of things whose consequences we haven't foreseen or worked out and that's certainly one of them, the phone I hate it, I've got a mobile phone but I only use it for me to make phone calls to other people, not for them to phone me.

23:50And I see the power of it when you see kids at bus stops going diddly, diddly, diddly. When you see those pictures of children in Thailand or whatever sitting by the side of the road doing this. What do you do about it? I don't know. I don't know. I only do the thing I know how to do, which is telling stories. That works for the people who read them. But the only way to make people want to read stories is to give them good stories and make them available. A library, a good library in schools, properly stacked and properly functioning with a knowledgeable librarian, that'll work enormously. What do you hope your legacy is as you come to this sort of milestone moment?

24:33I'm sure there's more to come, but do you ever think about legacy? I don't think so. I don't think so. I think if my books are still around in 100 years' time, I'd be very pleased. and I hope people will continue to read them and enjoy them and think about what I'm saying in them. Not take a message from it or a lesson from it, but just see the world a little differently.

24:57Thank you for listening to the interview from the BBC World Service. You'll find more in-depth conversations on the interview wherever you get your BBC podcasts, including episodes with UN Deputy Secretary General Amina Mohamed, tennis icon Martina Navratilova and political economist Francis Fukuyama. Until the next time, bye for now.

25:29If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. With the European Athletics Championships, the Men's FIFA World Cup and the Commonwealth Games all taking place, 2026 is shaping up to be a terrific year for global sport.

26:14And the More Than The Score podcast will be following all the action, bringing you interviews with sports stars and exploring the stories beyond the score sheets with the BBC's expert sports journalists. More Than The Score from the BBC World Service. Listen now. Search for More Than The Score wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

26:38You