'You Don't Know How Famous You Are Until Complete Strangers Stop You In The Street To Talk'

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What about those in the Christian church who have taken exception to it? They're attacking it because they themselves are misreading the Christian story; because they believe it's literally true. So I'm not too bothered. They used to criticize me on the grounds that I was inverting morality; that I was saying good is evil and evil is good. When the whole story was there it was quite clear that's not what I was doing. Because the good that the story celebrates is something that everybody can agree with.

But why, as an atheist, did you choose to cast the story in Christian terms? Because I was brought up a Christian — I was baptized, my grandfather was a clergyman, I went to Sunday School and to church almost every day of my life. I know the Bible pretty well and I know the prayer book even better. It's what I know. It's also the tradition that underlies a very great deal of the literature that means much to me and to western Europe. The Christian creation, fall and redemption stories are very interesting ones. I happen to think they're not true. It's people who think they're literally true that cause the trouble.

So when did you stop believing? It gradually fell away in my teen years. But I remain sympathetic to the religious impulse; the instinct to feel awe and wonder at the universe, to have a sense of moral relations with other conscious beings and unconscious beings such as animals. We're involved in a whole network of relations of trust and responsibility, joy and exploitation. It's when we become conscious of this, that the bleak religious questions come to mind: Why are we here? What are we for? Is there any purpose to our life beyond what we make of it? The conclusion I reach is the one the story reaches: we are responsible, we can't disclaim responsibility. If we want things to be right, to be good, we have to make them so.

How consciously was His Dark Materials written as a riposte to the Christian fantasies of Tolkien or C. S. Lewis? Tolkien was a Catholic and a great believer in the authority of the church; Lewis was an Ulster Protestant and came from that tradition of personal wrestling with God. In Tolkien you never had to decide about these questions; they were already decided ... so everything in it is rather trivial. In [Lewis's] Narnia books these things are not trivial; the ultimate destiny of the children hangs on how they behave. But the answers Lewis came up with are abominable and appalling. The child Susan at the end of The Last Battle is excluded from salvation because she's become too interested in lipstick and nylons. She's growing up through the natural stages of development every teenager does and becoming aware of her body. But Lewis hated it vehemently and punished with eternal damnation the one child that succumbs to it. That's so anti-life ... But this is the great Christian teaching sold in every Christian bookshop. So yes, I was writing against Lewis but it's not enough just to do that.

As a onetime teacher, what do you hope children will find in your books? Pullman: I would be very flattered, gratified and very happy if they find in my books the kind of things I found in the books I love — namely the joys of rereading my favorite bits over and over again. [When I was teaching] I wasn't constrained by a national curriculum ... I was free to play about with stories, to give children the experience of hearing and reading stories and poems without the constant nagging to interpret, criticize and analyze. That can be very interesting but the beginning has got to be enchantment; once you're half in love with it that's when you want to see how it works.

I also despair of the way in which children are increasingly protected from the world. I remember what it was like to play outside in the late summer evenings. Now we're scared of the traffic, of pedophiles etcetera, so we have prevented our children from some of the great experiences of life: to be bored, to have to find your own entertainment; to experience real darkness; real silence. They're frightfully deprived of these physical sensations and interactions with what the world is made of.