#149 My Problem With C.S. Lewis - Philip Pullman

29:02But to save the sin of mankind, it feels to me that if Jesus were in hell, it would be a sort of revolting, grotesque idea to put this perfect man into a position of actual proactive suffering. but then that i thought that's what the christian message was supposed to be about like him taking on something super more story more balanced yeah it's unbalanced at the moment yeah you know one thing that christopher hitchens once said uh he was asked about fiction he never wrote any fiction and he was celebrated as an incredible writer of non-fiction but when asked about writing a novel or something he said you know like i could just never do it and he said he said, all the friends I have who are good at writing fiction are also musical.

29:49And Hitchin said he doesn't have a musical bone in his body. Interesting. I think his favorite tune was Higher Love, interestingly, which I believe they played at his funeral. You'd think if you asked him for his favorite song, he might say something like classical concerto or something to make it sound impressive. But I'm sure he said it was that song, Bring Me a Higher Love. I like that song, don't get me wrong. But he says himself, he had no musical bone in his body and he talked about friends like martin amos as people who did have a bit of music in them you also have a bit of music in you i know you've never put anything out into the world but you've you've written and composed music do you think there's anything to this connection so good so good so good new spring arrivals are at nordstrom rack stores now get ready to save big with up to 60 off rag and bone mark jacobs free people and more how did i not know rack has adidas because there's always something new join the nordy club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first, and more.

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31:23I've often thought about the similarities and the differences between music and fiction because there are some differences. For example, counterpoint. Counterpoint in music, we can hear it, we can understand it. even a little simple thing like Frere Jacques. We do it in school and they sing it around the classroom and it's delightful. You can't do that in prose because you've only got one line. The closest you can come to that analogy in music is with a sonata for violin, which has only got one line playing at once. You can hint at counterpoint by playing on two strings at once. You know, hint at the presence of other tunes behind the tune you're playing.

32:05But it's very difficult to do that. And that's what prose is like. You can't easily hint at other things going on at the same time and weaving in with it. Yeah. Unless, and this is where it becomes really interesting, unless you're writing a comic. Ha, yeah. Because in a comic, you can have, well, you know, I mean the sort of complicated graphic novels. You've got several different things going on. You've got the picture showing some action taking place. you've got the words they say to each other in a speech but you've got a caption which might say something like 10 years later or meanwhile behind the woodshed or something like that um so you can have a kind of counterpoint uh and of course you can do that with with moving pictures with films as well and you know a great director will have all sorts of things going on at the same time which makes watching the film again um even more rewarding yes but it's very hard to do that with pure prose.

33:06So I don't know quite what, I mean, did Hitchens have any other examples of people who were makers of fiction and musical? Not that I can remember. I think it was sort of an anecdote about people that he knew as just having a sort of, I wonder if he just associates it with this sort of, this creativity. I mean, I think Martin Amos in response said something about how he said something like to be a novelist you've got to be like a little bit stupid I think he said you know he said that Christopher was so intelligent some I probably just you know being kind to his friend um but he said something like there needs to be almost this I suppose he's maybe getting at a kind of like naivety or um or uh you know there's just sort of ability to well I mean maybe to to imagine to sort of step out of this hyper-rationality, which I think you and I would probably characterize as a hyper-rationality.

34:00But maybe Amos meant that when he said that he's super intelligent. I'm not sure. I don't know. I've never heard of any... I didn't know Martin Amos. I've never met him. I hadn't heard of any association he had with music. He didn't play the piano or anything, did he? I don't know. I don't know. I'm not sure. I'm just sure I remember Hitchin saying this. And maybe Martin name it didn't have a musical but or at the very least i think maybe an appreciation for music like hitchens didn't like listening to music as far as i could tell like he who wasn't like i mean he did as much as the next man kind of thing but he he wasn't like a a connoisseur of music that's what he said about himself and i suppose you wouldn't necessarily have to play it but just to just to have a sort of musical i'm very very interested when i find people who are not musical a few weeks ago on desert island discs salman rushdie was the castaway oh yeah and every single one of his eight records was a sort of pop song from the 70s right not a hint of anything else no jazz no classical music no folk music it was all music of that sort pop music so radio one or two music.

35:09I was astounded.

35:14I don't play the piano to my great regret. Nobody says, I wish I'd never learned the piano, do they? We say, I wish I had learned the piano. Nobody says, I wish I'd never learned the piano. I wish I had learned the piano, but we moved about a lot. We didn't have a piano. It was very difficult. Sure. Instead, I had the portable instrument, the guitar. Yes. And this was in the early 60s, so naturally I wanted to be Bob Dylan. and learned all the chords and all that stuff. But that isn't really being musical. But it did give me another view into music, what chords mean and what it means on the harmony changes and how different singers and composers use that in different ways.

35:58I love that for its own sake. And I had a very varied choice myself when I went on Desert Island Discs. and I've always been interested in how it does compare to prose to writing. Poetry perhaps? I don't know. Yeah, well people talk about the connection between poetry and music. Well, it once was a very close connection. A lot of poetry was sung. Of course. And it is interesting now to look at songs from the 20th century and listen to the ones that have survived, that have become classic songs, what's good about them? Well, often it is the words, and often it's the words that are put together in a particularly singable way without consonants that clutter each other up.

36:45Oh, yes. I'm a huge believer in... In fact, when writing music, you find that oftentimes people do this. I do this too if I try to write music, is if you're sort of humming a melody, you just find that certain words just sort of appear they just feel phonetically right and my least favorite thing when listening to a song is when somebody is like stressing the wrong syllable to make it work you know like they'll be singing a tune and they'll say like you know um forever instead of forever just because it fits the tune and i i think that's bad writing that's bad composition it's just it's it's never worth it you might think oh but that word is so good there would if it doesn't phonetically work you have to get rid of it there's something very physical about it and so with with poetry i know that you're a big believer in in reading at least certain kinds of poetry out loud because that's how it's sort of supposed to be and you you kind of miss the the physicality yes it's it's not because it's supposed to be like that it's because it works better like that right okay because it works at its best that's the only way you can really experience it by getting it in your mouth yes getting your tongue and your teeth and your lips involved do you when you're writing do you speak aloud do you see how phrases sound out loud oh yes all the time um i can't write and this is another thing i don't understand about some writers um music who write with music playing it's impossible it's impossible any other sort of noise is all right um traffic fine children playing fine dogs barking no problem pneumatic drills absolutely bring them on but the slightest little hint of a tune or a patch of music and it's i can't i can't hear what i'm writing is that because it disrupts the rhythm it's very much a rhythmic thing yeah interesting yeah because i'm conscious of the the of the rhythm of the words i write because you you know prose has a rhythm yeah um and i like to know what the rhythm of the next sentence is before I find the words for it.

38:46Yeah, right. Well, that's much like songwriting, isn't it? I mean, if you... You know, it's got to go da-dum-da-dum-dum-dum. Exactly, yeah. You can't just put anything you like in there. It's not an arbitrary thing. It's got to fit. It's got to work. Yeah, quite. So I'm very conscious of that, yeah. Yeah. And what you said earlier about comic books I found really interesting and that there are certain aspects of some media which cannot be translated into others so i but i'm inclined to think when when you consider the difference between say prose or like a novel and say tv or film and you have experience with this because you know historic materials has been turned into both well the first part into a film and and the rest into a into a more recent television show and i suppose the main thing that you miss when converting books into films is length you just don't have the time to tell the whole story um but apart from that in the other direction there's a lot that's missed like tv and film can do the talking over each other it can give you more than one bit of information at the same time it can show you a location while you're hearing the dialogue whereas books can't do that so there's a lot that film can do that books simply can't and yet books are often considered the sort of the more elevated more foundational more proper way of doing uh they Consider that, my people who hadn't understood the power and the majesty of comic books.

40:15Yeah. I'm going to write about this because it's been on my mind for a long time. There are interesting things to say about the way comics are told and the fluency of the medium and that sort of thing. But books can do something.

40:33For example, take a sentence which I'm trying to remember. I'll get it nearly right sent us from Middlemarch Dorothea seldom visited the town but she did occasionally go out on little errands of charity or something now you can show her going in her dog cart you can't show her doing it occasionally yes it takes prose to tell you that yeah that's one thing you can't do so each of these all of these mediums have different different strengths and different different things they can do and things they can't do um another example that occurred to me just now and vanished um it'll either come back or it won't but i'll i wouldn't chase it i mean because my next question was going to be like what are some of the things that books can do that that films can't and of course they can they can take their time but also yeah i suppose a narrative element which in film i think the closest you get is when people decide to literally just have a voiceover or they put information on screen 10 years later a bit like the comic book, you know, because there's kind of no real way around that.

41:40Well, that betrays an insincerity of purpose. I think if you're working in a medium that has its strengths, go for the strength of that medium. Don't do something it's not suited to. The medium of film doesn't really suit you to having somebody reading a story over the top of it. So don't do it. Find another way of doing it. Well, were you fearful of this or suspicious of this on the occasions when people have approached you to translate your books into different media? No, my usual question is how much? Yeah. And if I get a satisfactory answer for that, they're welcome to it. Sure. But more seriously, yes, I was always interested, and you're quite right about length, until the sort of long form TV series, you know, a series of six hour long episodes came along, the length was a difficult thing.

42:39You could make a novel into a, well, you couldn't make a novel into a long film because you couldn't get it all in. Short stories make better films than novels do for that reason. But that's not the only thing you can do. Of course, with pictures on the screen, you can show things immediately you can take in a a scene in in in a second with your with your if you show it show them the scene show them they're standing on primrose up primrose hill looking down at london you can see the whole of london there it is um that's takes a bit longer if you're writing it in prose yeah on the other hand when you write you're enlisting the reader's imagination too.

43:25And the most common thing I think that people say after seeing a film of a book they knew quite well is but he shouldn't look like that and she'd never say that and oh no that's all wrong. It doesn't always work. It seldom works. It's probably true to say that crappy books make better films than good books. Yeah maybe that's got something to do with the fact that if they're a crappy book, it might be because it's a good story constrained by the wrong kind of medium that's better told elsewhere. Yeah. Or a story's just fallen into the wrong hands. Yeah. And I've heard you say before, the great thing about a film or a TV show is there's no law which says that once it's made, all of the books have to be destroyed.

44:12They're still there. You can still go and read them. So there is a sense in which you can, I think, quite seriously be like, I mean, you'll be protective over your intellectual property, not in a legal right, but in a kind of, I care about this, I put a lot into this story. But in a way, if somebody takes it and messes it up and makes a bad TV show or something, it's like, you know, kind of so what? Well, what you can say is, can I see my bank account, please? Again, they bought it from you. They bought the right to change it. Yeah, quite. And if you didn't want them to do that, you shouldn't have sold it.

44:42Yeah, I suppose that's true. I mean, you can sort of hang around the producer and nag the director and sit in on all the shooting and so on. Make yourself a damn nuisance. You'll get nowhere. You'll only get a headache from it and you'll just annoy everyone and nothing will change. Of course, people will... There are going to be many people who only watch the TV show and then also feel like they needn't bother with the books because they feel like, oh, I've heard the story. And then they will associate the way that the story is told in the film or the TV show with you. And does that bother you or do you just think, you know...

45:20whatever. It's a fact. It's a fact of the way things work. It's like this actor in that part. Can we get Alec Guinness's face away from our idea of George Smiley? No, but it doesn't matter very much. Yeah. I think for many people, that would be Ben Kenobi, which would very much upset him because I think he didn't much like playing in this silly little Star Wars drama. No, but he He had a very good agent and he got a percentage of all the royalties on there. Yeah, I think he so thought it was like unserious that to get him back for the second film, they had to offer him some crazy amount of money or percentage and he showed up for like five seconds.

45:59Which, you know, actors don't get. They get a straight up fee, but not for Guinness. I think they actually had to like cut up some of his performance from the first film to sort of use in the second film because he like was there for one day and didn't give them everything they needed. and he was so reticent to come back that they had to like basically fake it from other stuff it's it's fascinating bunch of rogues yeah um but you know i i kind of want to take a a bit of a hard pivot here and the reason for that is because you know we're talking about literature we've talked about religion um one thing i'm really interested in and have been as of late is consciousness and i get the impression that you have been too not least because of the the themes running out through your books but also just like the context in which I hear your name cropping up.

46:43You know, I speak to someone like Philip Goff, who we both know, talking about very like analytical philosophy, consciousness, and the philosophy of consciousness and foundations of reality and stuff. And he might just sort of mention your name and talk about the Book of Dust. Yes. Well, the Book of Dust was just finished. How many discounts does USAA Auto Insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multivehicle discount, safe driver discount, new vehicle discount, storage discount, legacy. How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usaa.com slash auto discounts. Restrictions apply.

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47:54Well, I found myself exploring in that book things which had caught at my attention on the way through the story from the very beginning. And they were to do with consciousness and imagination in particular. Yeah. what it is and how it works and what it isn't. And Goff came into my reading at a good point because I was just ready to become alert to this panpsychist idea, the idea that everything is actually conscious, which seems to me about the most reasonable and sensible thing I've ever heard a philosopher say. Matter, how can matter be conscious? Because, well, I'm made of matter. I know that.

48:37Wherever you slice me, I'm made of matter. There's nothing else in there. No little wisps of consciousness in there, or wisps of spirit or anything like that. I'm entirely material, and yet I'm conscious. Therefore, matter can be conscious. Whether this glass can be conscious, I'm not so sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if it retained a distant memory of having been raised to the lips of the ex-president of Magdalen over there in that portrait. Yes. or somebody else. I know my fingers are conscious because when I'm doing something that requires my attention to be not precisely on my fingers, they do the right things, typing, for example.

49:17Or I do a lot of working, woodworking. My hand knows what to do and it picks up a plane. Is it my hand or my brain being consciousness? No, it's my hand. I can feel it. That's where consciousness is. And this grew and became, in the course of writing The Rose Field, what Lyra came to call The Rose Field. Everything that we think of as the world, everything we can see and feel and hear and so on, is surrounded by a sort of mmbus of associations, possibilities, memories, resemblances. This is a sort of invisible field, just like a gravitational field, but one that doesn't vary with distance, just like the Higgs field, which permeates the entire universe.

50:10I'm not sure about the Rose field, because it partly depends on us because it's partly created by us every time we see every time i see a um um a lorry filled with vegetables i think of covent garden that's my association with it but there it is somewhere in the rose field lies covent garden my memories of going there after the work i did in i was doing in moss boros just around the corner yeah um that's what the rose field is. And the way we perceive the Rose field is not by sort of sitting in a chair and making it up. We perceive it with our imagination. Imagination, as many people have asserted, William Blake, for one, is a sense of perception.

50:56It's not making things up, it's seeing what's there. I've been reading a lot of Coleridge recently, because in the Biographia Literaria and other places, he talks a lot about his conception of imagination, primary and secondary imagination, and fantasy, which is a sort of lower kind of thing altogether. And I find it fascinating, and I'm now writing out for myself a sort of non-fiction paper on what it is that Lyra means when she talks about the Rosefield. what it is that she discovers by looking at the Rosefield and what dust is which is what happens when our imagination goes out the first time dust is mentioned in the whole of the saga in chapter 2 or something one of the scholars in the room very like this room now I come to think of it yeah quite where Lod Asriel is showing his lantern slides what's that beam of light and he said it's dust yeah Yeah.

52:05And not light, but dust. But is it coming up or coming down or going up? That's the big question. Is dust going out from us or is it coming to us? And that's what Lyra discovers. So it's a bit of both. And that is in fact what our imagination is. That's how we contribute to the rose field, how we build it up. Yes. And interestingly, in that particular moment, looking at the slide, looking at the second or third slide, there's a child next to Lord Asriel, and the child is not attracting dust in the same way. Given that dust here is associated with, essentially, consciousness in this context, a lot of people will say, okay, children are still developing and whatnot, but they're clearly conscious.

52:52They have interiority, they have thoughts. What was the motivation behind making it quite explicit that dust was an adult thing? Because it's knowledge as well as awareness. It's conscious knowledge, conscious awareness. It's thinking about itself. It's self-reflexive knowledge. Children don't think about themselves in that way, in the way that adults do. I mean, there are a lot of contradictions and mysteries and things I didn't get right and things I could have gone back. and fiddle with a bit. But that's the case with every book. Yeah. Do you feel you have the right to do that? Like if you decided, you know, chapter 14 of my first book wasn't quite right.

53:38Do you think you have the right to change it now? I'm either right, but not very good sense to do that. Yeah. You annoy publishers, you annoy readers. Oh, I've got to buy another copy of this damn thing. Yes. To no great purpose. Well, it's interesting that, you know, of course with nonfiction, you get updated editions, don't you? 40 year anniversary and it's like oh expanded and updated and i just wonder if novelists should maybe sometimes do the same thing especially with a book that's so sensitive to uh the sort of present scientific understanding in that i remember hearing you say once i mean you you sort of draw this uh connection between what you call dust and what a scientist will call dark matter or dark energy and i remember you saying once that you were just sort of praying that scientists didn't work out what dark energy was until you'd finish the book.

54:28I still haven't. Because you can imagine, well, I mean, maybe one day they'll find out. I wonder if one day dark energy and dark matter will be officially associated with consciousness in such a way that your book becomes exceptionally famous as like a pre-empting. Move from the fiction to the non-fiction show. Yes, quite, quite, quite. But yeah, the concept of rewriting is interesting. But it's not just Just think if Dickens, for example, had decided to go back and kill Oliver Twist halfway through the story, or to resurrect somebody who did die, or Shakespeare says at the end of Hamlet, oh, Hamlet's only wounded.

55:11We can bet him. I mean, people kind of do this without actually editing the story itself. They sometimes do it implicitly, like when you have a really nice, complete sort of story or a sequence of stories in films, for example. Then Disney want to make a bunch of money, so they resurrect a character, not by editing the original story, but by saying that at some point later they come back from the dead. And that doesn't just make for a bad film later. It also kind of ruins the first bit. Do you think so? I don't think you need to ruin the first bit. Hey, you read criticism, you read the critics, you know what a film's about, you can choose not to go and see it.

55:49Yeah. Or you can say, yeah, that's all right, but it's not as good as the original Mickey Mouse or whatever it was. Yeah, sure. Yes, it's kind of accepted now that films themselves have a kind of rose field around them, which is all the possible films that you can make with the characters. Yeah, yeah. Stories that they haven't been told yet. Yeah.

56:14it's a strange world, the world of film. It's a strange world because it affects the emotions of those who make the films. They're very excited, very excitable film people. Yeah. They're passionate about this, passionate about that. And that's possibly largely because there's so much money in court. Mm-hmm. Fantastic amounts of money. Mm-hmm.

56:41on barely credible things. I heard the story of the prop man for a film. It wasn't one of my films, but he was working on my film. And he'd been required to get a boat, a big sort of fishing boat thing. And he couldn't find one anywhere in America. So he went to Germany where they have a lot of fishing boats and he said, that's the one, that's the one, I'll have that one. and so he bought the boat and had federal express bring the boat to america fedex um why well we're going to see it for four or five seconds on the screen that's all but they don't hesitate in spending money like that yeah um because there's so much money involved it does distort their reality field a bit it's quite unbelievable isn't it i mean in a way that It's weird because you want to say something like, well, it's because it's a visual media and you want people to be immersed in the story.

57:39But then if you think about something like theater, you know, you sort of have puppeteers and you have sort of cardboard backgrounds that nobody cares about because you can still immerse yourself in the story. You do that in the theater because that's how you behave. Yeah. We know that we have to pretend. Yeah. When we're in the theater. And so we do. And we don't mind that the wall waves a bit when the door closes and the, you know, that's not really tea in the teapot. It's whatever it is. We don't mind that because we have all gathered there to pretend. Yeah. But we don't go to a cinema to pretend.

58:16Yeah. We don't have the same relationship with it. That's another interesting thing, the difference between film and theatre.

58:28a film is much more like a novel than a stage play can be like a novel because on stage there are no close-ups film is told in lots of close-ups and so are novels yes where to put the characters and where to put the camera that's David Mamet's two questions yeah and it applies to novels too yeah well it does very much where do you put the camera is the most important question of all where am I seeing this from who is seeing this I tell people that who are writing a book or trying to write a book to ask themselves where's the light coming from in this scene is the curtains open is it a dark night outside or is it a blazing sunshine or is there a fire in the hearth but only one little side like some where's the light coming from what light are we seeing the characters by this is a this is a film question really but it helps a great deal if you're writing um a scene in a novel i think to know where the light's coming from yeah uh you write um you've written from the the perspective of this so-called omniscient narrator that is to say you've got these kind of different ways of characterizing the author of the text, but within the logic of the text, right?

59:56There's the reliable narrator, the unreliable narrator, there's first person, there's third person. And this idea of the omniscient narrator who just sort of knows everything has been kind of critiqued sometimes as a little... Yeah, he was a suspicious character. With modernism, there came a great suspicion of the of the omniscient narrator, because who is he? He's privileged because we think of him as a he. Where's he come from? Where is he standing? People begin to mistrust the idea of this voice that comes from nowhere. And only trust books if they had a clearly named and described narrator who was one of the cast of characters.

1:00:37Yeah, right. You know, I've always loved the omniscient narrator as a way of storytelling. It's a huge privilege to tell the story from this position. You can dart about like a dragonfly. In fact, novelists do have done that. If you think of the chapter in Vanity Fair, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, which describes the Battle of Waterloo.

1:01:05She, who am I talking about? She, Thackeray, has a little character called Ensign Stubbs or something. And he's in the battle and he's frightened about it. And he's thinking back to his grandfather's farm where he grew up and the apple trees there. And then later, many, many years later, when he was an old man, he would say so and so and he would look back on this time. So along the stream of time, this sort of dragonfly-like attention of the omniscient narrator darts backwards and forwards. It's a wonderful thing to see. It's a wonderful thing to do. but it's less and less done now because of the suspicion people have of this omniscient narrator yes well you know like sometimes people who are religious think about everything existing in the mind of god it's like there's one great big mind and we're all just sort of living in it and it's sort of in control but there's also a kind of freedom that we have even though we exist inside the mind of god and thinking of like you know the the world of of i mean we're in oxford right now, imagining Lyra's Oxford and Jordan College and all the like.

1:02:08That kind of exists or was created in your mind. You've got these little characters that also seem to have lives of their own, but exist inside of your mind. They're in the Rosefield. That's what I mean by the Rosefield. The Rosefield is where impalpable things are. It's the world of ghosts and phantoms and shadows and mysteries and of metaphors and things like. So yeah, Lyra's world is part of of the rose world lyra's oxford is part of the rose world do you imagine yourself as an author as being like part of that world or in that world or the creator of that world in like a like a narrative sense like when you're writing or if you were to go back and read do you sort of picture yourself sat there in the hall watching lyra run up to the you know up to the president's back room or whatever it's called and or are you sort of picturing yourself almost in this like god-like fashion of kind of being everywhere at once and just being as you're aware that lyra's running through the hall you're also aware that as long as it's relevant you know something else is going on beyond the city gates or whatever uh yes but i'm not like god i'm like a film director yeah who also is close to lyra with the camera to follow her as she gets up there who also knows what's going on in the kitchen because there's another film unit in there filming those bits which later in the hands of the editor and the director will be cut together so that we you know all that stuff i'm directing a film um i'm not um i'm not like god i'm like um awesome wells yeah interesting i mean the concept of of writing a book as if it were a film i i sometimes wonder if if because i know it's been the 20th century full of novels that are like films because the film was there.

1:03:56That's it, yeah. Novelists saw films. They watched films. Graham Greene is a good example. He watched a lot of films. He was a film critic for a while. Yeah. And, you know, you can imagine... Well, I think we all do now, whether we do so intentionally or purposefully or not. If we're writing a scene, we imagine it as a film. They come in, they speak, we see them closely. He passes a note under the table to his neighbor. We see that in close-up because we tell them about it. In a film, you'd have the camera down there watching it. One of the things you can't do on the stage. There's a lovely cartoon in those early editions of Punch showing the influence of film on the stage.

1:04:47And there's an actor and actress poised in the act of being about to kiss. She's in his arms like this. And behind there's a long queue of people forming from the stalls, looking at them through a magnifying glass and then going away again. Close up, you see. Can't really do it on the stage, but this was a little cartoon illustrating that. So we can't unthink the cinema. We can't think our way back to a time when there wasn't that way of telling stories. Dickens died before the cinema existed. Bunt. A lot of his later books in particular are written as if for a cinema that didn't exist. Like the opening of Bleak House.

1:05:27It's a perfect film panorama. London. Lincoln's in mud, fog. and the fog gathers in the streets. It pinches the fingers of the little cabin boy on deck and it settles in the bowl of the skipper's pipe. All these close-ups in this great panorama of London. And later on in, I think it's our mutual friend, there's a dinner party and he goes round just like a camera would, scans all the way around the guests, shows them in action and talking and just what a film director would do. Now, Dickens was an extraordinary genius. He said somewhere, every writer of fiction, whether or not he consciously writes for the stage, is in effect writing for the stage.

1:06:17Well, there he was both right and wrong. Yes, we do write in a dramatic way, but we were writing for the medium he didn't know anything about, which is film. He was writing for film. Another writer of the same, well, Thackeray, we just mentioned him. At the end of one of the chapters in Vanity Fair, I think he says, well, our dolls have had their play, let's fold them up and put them back in the box and we'll pick them up another time so a lot of writers at that time were thinking in terms of a dramatic presentation of their works but the medium didn't exist yet yeah well i mean dickens probably would have been aware as anybody that although yeah writing for the stage you are able to zoom in and stand next to the character and look at their eye in detail and you know not for the stage no but that's what i mean like that's so like before cinema he would have been aware that you've got like you're writing the theater but there's this extra thing where you can zoom in and you can you can see the writing on the inside of the jacket yeah that kind of stuff and film seems like a sort of natural corollary of that i think there are some things you can overcome i mean i'm thinking about like as well as the the way that the visuals are done there's also the the the dialogue um things like monologues are extremely rare in in films because they're a device in theater where you know that this is just because you need to hear a character's inner thoughts and again you're able to kind of go like well i know you probably wouldn't really say this out loud but we're here to pretend and this is very useful whereas in a film it feels a bit sort of wrong and in a book of course you can do whatever you like well films um films took a little while before they were before we could be aware of all the all the things they could do i think an early i think it was hitchcock's film about a lifeboat there are people stuck in the lifeboat and it was an early talkie and there was music and the producer said where the hell is the orchestra i can't see an orchestra they're in a lifeboat where's the orchestra hitchcock said where's the camera yeah otherwise you know we're pretending this it's yeah yeah i see what you mean because of course watching that for the first time you think like yeah like why would i be hearing music in this in this circle you know i'd never considered that i mean i know people talk all the time about when films started doing sound like there's some weird things that we sort of take for granted or can't really understand now but like i'd never thought about the idea that when music is introduced it's this extremely strange thing to do like why like okay i'm watching a scene on a lake why there are a of violins that's so interesting because now we just we don't even know in fact it's more conspicuous and music isn't there now in a film we notice things when they're not right when they go wrong whether they're badly placed or too loud or something like that sure if you had a sudden burst of hip hop in a film in a film about Robin Hood we think well that's a bit odd yeah so we notice when things are don't work or go wrong yeah partly because we're so used now to seeing films and reading books where they go right yeah Yeah.

1:09:15Well, you know, there's a fascinating trend of people watching films and TV with the subtitles on. Like nowadays, young people, not just people who are like hard of hearing, like everybody seems to watch stuff with the subtitles on because the characters are all mumbling. And it's got something to do with the fact that when films were first to thing, the microphones just weren't that good. So you had to project like you were doing theater. When the microphones get good enough, you know this microphone is right in front of my face so i could sort of whisper into it and he'd be able to hear and actors felt the freedom to give a more realistic performance but it actually made it very difficult to understand what they were saying well i get the subtitles thing because i have a hearing aids and i i i need the subtitles that but the same thing i'm sorry i keep bashing this i'm just picking up all my bumps the same thing is true in a different way when you think about the difference between operatic singing and showbiz singing.

1:10:13Operatic singers for hundreds of years had no microphones. They had to sing against, they had to overcome the orchestral sound, which led them to a style of singing which favoured the vowels over the consonants. And you got a lot of which you can't even tell what language it is, but it's a voice making a sound. But as soon as electric microphones were invented in the 20s, I suppose, and you had the heyday of the crooner, the Bing Grosby. Blue moon. You could sing really quietly and still be heard at the back of the auditorium or, of course, on a film. Yeah. Frank Sinatra said, I think, unless this is apocryphal or I've made it up, that his instrument was the microphone.

1:10:58But Frank Sinatra doesn't exist without the electric microphone. That's absolutely right, yes. Because we see a microphone... Why such things as prom, you know, when they have the season of the proms and they have a showbiz night when they have operatic singers singing songs from Carousel and Oklahoma. So they all sound wrong because they're singing in the wrong tradition. Yeah. I mean, we see a microphone. It's like in this context, there are microphones in front of us. And the job is just to pick up the sound so people can hear it. It's not supposed to actually do anything. And likewise... I mean, if we were talking now on a stage with a large theater there, we'd be speaking in a very different way.

1:11:37Yeah. And it would be like, you know, the microphone is here to basically serve the function of just making everything relatively louder so that everyone can hear, right? But we don't consider that when you see someone holding a microphone, we think, oh, that's just because without it, you wouldn't be able to hear them. But not in the context of because the rest of the context that's also being performed would overplay them. Like the microphone is as much an instrument as the strings on the violin, you know, are necessary. I saw, I think it was last year or the year before, David Tennant played Macbeth.

1:12:10And I saw it in London. And when we sat down in the theatre, they told everyone to put headphones on. They were all wired up. And the characters all had microphones on, as they typically do. But the idea was, not only I think sound effects and things were not, but the characters could whisper. So in the really intense moments, you know, he pulls Lady Macbeth near to him and he's whispering to her. in this sort of like quiet desperation and that's something that you couldn't do in typical theater and have everyone hear what you were saying no but you'd fake it there'd be ways of there'd be ways of i mean a skillful actor would have been trained to speak very quietly in a way that's perfectly clear yeah um and that's one reason i think why people like subtitles now because actors don't have that sort of training that's true but then at the same time I think there was something I mean I remember when I sat down and put headphones on and there was a little bit of a feeling of kind of like oh you know are they doing something a bit are they trying to be like funky with it but I must say there was something about the the genuine like whisper that I when I heard it I was like that really works and I don't think that could have been could have been replicated without this yeah and I guess that's the kind of thing that film allows you to do but also it's something that novels are missing in that like you can tell someone that a character is whispering but when you hear someone whisper it literally does something to like your brain chemistry like you you just naturally you're evolutionary wired evolutionarily wired to think i'm being told something secret you lean in you're listening your ear turns to the side right and you can you can write like oh you know somebody whispered and it perhaps just sort of doesn't have the same effect i mean do you do you have uh ideas tips thoughts on how to recreate that very physical like the leaning in of the listener at the theater in the novel format i i would i would um make it physical i would i would um emphasize the physical you know um her hair tickling his cheek um the um the the smell of her shampoo whatever it is you could you could introduce other senses to give the give the feeling of being close and quiet you can do that When we were talking about consciousness and religion and the themes throughout your books, I'm interested in to what extent you consider philosophy, let's say, or religious ideas to basically be good inspiration for writing a good story or to be the thing that you hope your stories inspire people to go and learn.

1:14:45Like these themes of consciousness, for example, are you sort of thinking that somebody might read this book, think this consciousness stuff is really interesting and hope that they'll go and learn some philosophy of consciousness? Or are you literally just seeing it as like an interesting sort of plot device?

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1:15:42I suppose both, really. I mean, I'd like people who read Lyra's Search for Dust and what it means to think about that themselves and maybe go and read Philip Goff about consciousness and other people about consciousness and think what it does mean and how it works and so on. I'd like that, but that's not my purpose in writing the story. Yeah. my purpose in writing the story well it's never it's never pure it's never simple one of my purposes was to make some money because i'm a professional writer i don't want to lose my spend my time not earning money when i could so that's one purpose another purpose is to tell a story that comes to me as clearly as i possibly can um i am the servant of the story i think i've written about this in in my introduction to the grim tales um or if it wasn't there it was somewhere else i am a servant of the story and i must do what good servants do i must come to work on time i must um not come to work drunk i must um do all the research necessary to make sure that my writing hand has all the facts it needs that it's just i must i must serve the story that's my purpose in doing it.

1:17:06Another purpose might be to gain the good opinion of people whom I admire. If so-and-so gives me a nice review, I can pat myself on the back for that. And there are all sorts of other reasons for which one, perfectly valid, perfectly good reasons for which one might want to write a book. And persuading people of one's worldview might be one of them. Yeah. Some people swear by writing a bit intoxicated, a bit drunk. What is it that they say? Write drunk, edit sober, that kind of thing. The way you said not show up to work drunk, I wonder if you have thoughts on the sort of stream of consciousness inducing states of being a little bit tipsy.

1:17:51Well, I don't need it very often. If I do need it, well, I mean, there are various things you do when you've been working all day and nothing's disappeared and you're feeling wretched well one thing is to fill a glass with gin i mean a proper glass you know with gin and drink that quite quickly that works yeah another trick um and it is a trick um is to write a lot of dialogue yeah hi oh hello i haven't seen you for a long time no where you've been oh here and there how are you getting on that's half a page already all they've been done is just waffling um but if you go by pages as i do and you count three pages as a day's work and you're getting to the end of the day and you're tired and you're fed up and you've got a headache and you've written nothing lots of dialogue go for that fill the page with hardly any trouble at all that's another trick is that a target three three pages a day you say it used to be i say it used to be because i always use for years and years all my life right by hand.

1:18:52Sure. And I wrote three pages, three A4 pages, narrow-lined. And then I finished the sentence at the bottom of the last page. So I'd already got the next page conquered. And then I stopped. And that was a day's work. Why write by hand? Well, I preferred it. I like the feeling of forming letters gracefully. I like the look of my writer. I liked the look of my writing as it was then. I had a rather graceful italic hand, which I had taught myself because I wanted to write gracefully. And also because the way you learn to form the letters and so on when you learn italic is a very energy-saving way.

1:19:36It gives you the quickest, the most economical link from one letter to another. And it's also the most legible. All sorts of reasons. Like that, I prefer to write. I like the feel of writing with a ballpoint pen. I don't write with a fountain pen because they have the habit of going dry if you don't write anything for a minute or so. So when you've stopped from it, you have to decide, is it a long pause or a short pause? If it's a long pause, I'll have to take the cap off and put it on instead of drying it. Well, that's fiddly. That's annoying. I use a ballpoint, which never gets dry. However, COVID came along, and that had many results for all sorts of people.

1:20:15And one of the results it had on me was to give me arthritis in my joints. That's part of the trouble I had with my hip. But I couldn't, the thumb joints were very painful. I couldn't hold the pen. It was just too bloody painful. So I just turned to the keyboard and tapped instead. So all before then, everything was written by hand. And do you sort of old-fashioned style show up to the publishers with a wad of papers, you know, by mail in an envelope? Oh, no, no, no. No, it would always go through a typing stage. Yeah. And would you type it out after you wrote it? Oh, yeah, I would, yeah. There was one book I didn't because I was in a hurry to get it finished, and my wife typed it for me, but she used a voice-directed thing.

1:21:01So she'd read a passage and it would type it out. Yeah. And that only failed once. There was a passage about some trees. I was describing some trees, and it suddenly said, Ruff, ruff, ha, ha, ha. I said, what's this? Oh, she said, I remember the dog barked. and it spelt it and i laughed so it printed those things as well yeah it's it's funny that there's definitely something about um technology which limits or at least changes the way that that writing is done yeah it does but anyway by that time um by the time keby came along you know i was already in my 70s i've been writing all my life um it didn't really make any difference typing from writing i can see it might have done once but my style was too established i was too used to putting words together.

1:21:49There are a few things I think it does. I mean, I'm thinking of there are two examples that spring to mind. One of them, my friend Sheehan Quirk was speaking to David Perel and they were talking about the influence of the backspace key, where prior to the ability to just hit backspace there was a sort of commitment that came along with writing a sentence. You had to think about it. You had to think about it first. Maybe you'd consider the rhythm and the write maybe you'd consider how it's going to sound and then put it down to paper because you can't just sort of type and then almost forget that you're typing go oh no no i'll go i'll go back and change that it's not as easy you can but it's more of a faff it's less of a faff now we have computers before computers we need an actual typewriter it was a real yeah nuisance but now it's the work of a moment yeah swipe you swipe your mouse over it and that must affect the way that people write it must do um but i think it would affect more people who are beginning to write rather than people who've been writing for 60 years already i mean the other thing that's interesting again this is a point that she and made to me once was that like you know there's a kind of corrective element to technology whereby if you were to take a shakespearean sonnet and put it into microsoft word not only would there be a bunch of like red lines telling you that there's something wrong it would probably also suggest improvements well i'm sure ai would yeah oh yeah yeah i remember i saw an ai uh a photo once where it was some ai writing tool and somebody had quoted descartes saying i think therefore i am and the ai tool was like try just saying therefore i am you know it's more confident because it was trying to get rid of the sort of like i think therefore i am and it was like get rid of the i think i think it's i think it's cleaner and that's a very good example.

1:23:40It's sort of a... A very good example of why AI will never supersede the brain. You think never? Never. In terms of anything and everything or just writing? Because the AI has no concept of what I call now the Rosefield. The things that, the contexts that surround things. Everything is a first ever with thing, except that of course, it's got to imitate something that's been written. Over five million pages by somebody else. um no it's a it's a it's a toy it's a trick it's a it's a little bit it's a dead end it's a lot of like quite grandiose fears about artificial intelligence you know destroying the world and whatnot but certainly creative industries are concerned and well one of the reasons they're concerned is because it's much cheaper to pay an ai to write your novel than or a song or score or whatever it is than to pay a human being.

1:24:40And they haven't organized themselves into unions yet. So they're still cheaper. I have no doubt that maybe now and certainly within the next 10 years an AI could write a novel and I could read it and think that it was written by a brilliant human author. And maybe that's because I'm a bad reader and a bad writer but it just seems to me quite clear that that would be the case and it may be that i mean there are there are uh like meta considerations that change the way you interact with the text i sometimes point to the example of john berger in ways of seeing who presents a painting and says just look at this and see what you think and then you turn over the page and it's the same painting but it's labeled this is the last painting van gogh did before he killed himself it's like how does that change how you interact with the art?

1:25:32On one level, it kind of shouldn't because it's the same image, but the context does matter. And I think that there will always be a sense in which if you know something's written by an AI instead of a human, it's just going to change how the story meets your ears. But if you don't know, in terms of just the pure ability to recreate the sort of felt creative energy of reading a text, I just have no doubt that it will get there. Do you disagree? Well, think of it the other way around. Is there anything that might persuade you, for example, that Hamlet was written by AI? Well, look, it's difficult for me to say now, right?

1:26:04And also because Hamlet is so famous and so iconic. And we want to say something like, there's just something so human and so impossible to recreate. But I wonder if we're being sort of technologically naive in the way that chess grandmasters said, you know, A computer can play chess, but it can't be creative about chess. It can't do the beautiful moves and make the sacrifices. You need that sort of human intuition. And within five years, it's now impossible to beat a chess computer, no matter who you are. And I sometimes fear that we're a bit too optimistic in the same way about arts and literature in a way that will stop us from putting safeguards in place to protect the human element of the arts.

1:26:49Because we say, oh, we don't need to worry about that. it's a big question and a very important question and i have no idea of the answer well of course nobody does that's that's the thing it's just when i heard you say you know that an ai will will never replace a human brain i think that's true in many contexts um but it's just that it it struck me because the creative art is is probably the the area in which people are most fearful of the loss of the human spirit well yes i don't think they need to be fearful about it it's to me to me it's simple we we we imagine we can imagine ai can't imagine yeah all you can do is imitate um and thinking back to coleridge again now and his distinction between primary and secondary imagination on the one hand and fancy on the other um what um ai does is falls firmly into the realm of fancy yeah taking stuff that already exists and putting it together in a different way.

1:27:45That's not imagining.

1:27:49AI can't imagine. That's not what it does. What it does is imitate bits of text that already exist. I think to some degree what the human brain is kind of, I mean, we're creative beings, but always creative beings. you know as creative yeah as as not created beings we're creative beings and it's not like you know oasis plagiarized the beatles but there's a sense in which oasis probably wouldn't exist without the beatles you know there's sort of you need to have heard music to create music you need to have seen things in the world to create things in the world it doesn't just sort of crop up ex neilo and so there's an extent to which even in the case of human imagination it kind of is a case of like taking all of the input data, the stories you were brought up on, the experiences you've had in life, and then sort of mixing them together and cutting them up and taking bits from here and bits from there and sort of gluing it all together and using that to create something new.

1:28:49What do you think is going on that's extra that the computer isn't doing that comes along with human imagination? Well, one thing that the computer isn't doing is feeling any joy in what it does. And one of the basic impulses, in fact probably the basic impulse of all human creation, is delight. And I think of the example of that extraordinary little piece of stone, piece of ochre, discovered in the caves in southern Africa. It's about 80 ,000 years old. And it's got a little crisscross pattern on it. Lines go this way, and then the lines go that way. Some prehistoric lady or gentleman was sitting under a tree on a nice sunny day with a cool breeze blowing and he had a full stomach and was feeling pretty good about things and there was this bit of stone and he discovered he could make a mark on it and then he made a pattern and oh I can make another pattern making of patterns is the basis of all art I think and certainly that simple making of marks on the stone and making patterns by having other lines going across them that is probably the simplest example of what a work of art is if you don't feel a joy in the making and a joy in the perception because other people would have looked at it and said hey that's good they make one for me no you can do you show it like this or another pattern um drums yeah sure That's a pattern.

1:30:21You know, we have the delight in the way that encourages us to move. And it's the element of joy and delight and pleasure and pride. And that's what's missing in a computer. I don't know if they can fake that. I would still know, wouldn't we? I don't know. But that's what would be missing. You know full well it's only whirring through billions and billions of examples of what word comes after this word. It's not feeling any joy in it. It's not feeling any delight. Not for now. Who knows what's to come? Stranger things have happened, but I share your suspicion on it at least that point. Philip Pullman, thank you so much for your time.

1:31:05It's been fun. Thank you. I've enjoyed this very much.