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

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

Philip Pullman is one of England's most cherished and celebrated writers. Author of the popular His Dark Materials series of books (later adapted into a film, The Golden Compass (2007), and a 2019 HBO/BBC drama series), his novels are dripping with philosophical and religious themes.Get Philip Pullman's Books here.-TIMESTAMPS:0:00 - C.S. Lewis Tells Filthy Lies5:12 - Childhood Innocence is Overrated10:09 - Religion in Philip’s Novels21:26 - How to Improve the Story of Jesus and the Gospels27:43 - The Connection Between Music and Fiction36:24 - Books vs Movies43:38 - Consciousness in The Book of Dust50:05 - Should Novelists Go Back and Update Their Books?56:11 - The Omniscient Narrator1:00:12 - How Movies Changed Novels1:05:49 - Why Subtitles Are So Popular Now1:10:56 - The Role of Philosophy in Philip’s Novels1:13:27 - Philip’s Writing Process1:20:11 - The Fear of AI in Creative Industries

Sir Philip Pullman, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. C.S. Lewis once wrote, I think, this is a paraphrase, that a children's book that's only enjoyed by children is a bad book. Do you agree with that? Yes, I do. I disagree with Lewis about a lot of things, but I do agree with him when he says, talk sensible things and says sensible things about books.

One other sensible thing he said was the difference between books that have an atmosphere in books that don't. And he referred to Hiawatha. He likes Hiawatha because of the atmosphere of the woods and the Indian names and all that stuff that comes with it. Whereas other people he's spoken to don't enjoy that. They're only interested in the plot. So Lewis is enjoying and rightly and referring to something that I would now refer to as being in the Rosefield, which I could explain a little bit more.

later. It's the atmosphere around things, the context of things, what they suggest, what they remind us of, what they, the things that they are like, that sort of thing. So Lewis was right about that. Yeah, I think it's perfectly true. If only children enjoy it, yes, it's not a very good book that adults would probably enjoy. Yes, Lewis says a waltz that can only be enjoyed while waltzing is a bad waltz. I think he sort of uses that by means of analogy, although probably an imperfect analogy for what we're talking about here. Well, there are all sorts of ways of enjoying a waltz. There are ways of becoming obsessed by walt. I've got a tune that goes from my head all the time when I'm worried about something.

It's a sort of El Zat's Viennese waltz. A real one. It's just the most banal series of bars of music, but it's a waltz and it's a Viennese waltz, and I can't get rid of the bloody thing. So, you know, there are ways of experiencing waltzes that just don't involve dancing at all. But it's the what you're the same year. I don't think it's a good analogy with books, actually. Yeah. But he did say he was a good critic in my view, Lewis, but a terrible storyteller. Really?

I mean, sometimes people posit you as, I think Peter Hitchens has explicitly called his Dark Materials, your most famous trilogy. a sort of conscious response to the Chronicles of Narnia. Do you see yourself as a sort of contralo-Lewis writer? Peter Hitchens is a silly ass in many ways. No comment. Well, you don't have to. I've seen your M's clip. Glad you're here.

No, if it is a conscious response to that, yes, I agree it might be to some extent, but it's also many other things as well. Certainly wasn't entirely written to discredit or topple C.S. Lewis off some imaginary throne. Not like that at all. I don't like what he does in the Narnia books. I wanted to show an alternative, but that was only one of the things I was doing. Yes. What is it that you don't like about Lewis's Narnia? The way he treats his characters. the, to have the children go through this extraordinary adventure with all sorts of voyages

to different places and see different things and then dispatch them in the end in a railway accident seems to me the most ghastly way out. He didn't have the responsibility, couldn't face a responsibility of making them grown up. He didn't want them to be grown up. He wanted them to turn away from things like, or is it, nylons and invitations and things, which is a terrible thing to do to a child is on the verge of growing up. Children don't want to be sent to heaven. They want to grow up and be men and women. The promptings of sexuality in, you know, the teenage body and the teenage mind are important and wonderful and valuable things and just to dismiss them in that offhand way. Terrible, terrible, terrible things. Another thing in one of the

other books, I can't remember which it is, there's a boy whose mother is dying. You've got cancer or something. And he goes to this other land, or whether it was Narnia or somewhere else. And he's told there's a magic apple tree there where if you take an apple, one of these apples and each it kills you of any disease. Yeah. But he's a good boy, and he doesn't do it because he's been told that stealing is wrong. So he doesn't do it. And he doesn't take the apple, and he goes home. But wonder of wonders, there's a magic apple on his pillow or something.

Anyway, he gives it to his mind, and she's all right. What a lie. What a filthy lie. And I say filthy because there are children who are reading that book, who themselves. have a mother who is dying of cancer or something, and who he's trying to persuade that their behavior will make a difference to their mother living or dying.

If you're a bad boy, your mother's going to die. If your mother lives, it's because you're a good boy and didn't, they said, it's a filthy lie. I hate that. I despise it. Lewis seems to be interested in the very Christian sense in innocence and innocence as a good thing and the preservation of that childlike innocence.

I mean, in His Dark Materials, you are sort of explicitly writing contra this by having your characters intentionally sort of go through a second kind of fool, a second kind of Adam and Eve. And without going into too much detail, like this matured, And the purity and development that, like, Lyra goes through, is a good thing. It's presented by me as a good thing. Which is a natural thing to grow up. Yes. It's a good thing to feel sexual desire.

It's a good thing to see the difference between good and evil. These are not wicked things. They're good things. Yes, which is quite the opposite for C.S. Lewis, who quite explicitly cuts off that adulthood. And I wonder if that's... Yes. Well, I don't blame him only. I mean, there's a whole

platoon of children's books and children's writers in what used to be called the Golden Age of Children's Literature. Yes. Where, and you see this in A.A. Milne. Very strongly in A.A. Mill. And in the drawings of Shepherd that accompany Winnie the Pooleons. Yes. You know, little children, aren't they wonderful, aren't they beautiful, aren't they exquisite,

aren't they in a sort of fotive sense desirable? When A.A. Milne was associate editor of Punch, which was in the early part of the century, up to the Great War and through the 20s and so on, he published cartoon after cartoon of, which were all the same joke. It's a little child, often in a state of semi-nudity in the bath or changing on the beach or something, saying something unbearably cute and sweet and charming and an adult looking on fondly, which actually curdle the stomach when you see them now. I mention the co-atties, I've got a copy of Bounceet of Punch for those years, which I inherited from my mother.

And it wasn't as I'd look through it and noticed this. I was thinking about the children's literature and innocence and experience thing at the time. I saw this featuring very strongly in the punch that A.M.N. was responsible for. and I haven't been able to read Winnie the Pooh without my stomach turning. Or what is so stomach churning about this

image of the child saying something cute? Because partly because of the way it's enjoyed in an almost sensuous way by the adult because of the way it's drawn very often you know, the little naked limbs

peeping from under the towel, that sort of thing. There's something we're not furtive about it because it's done so unknowingly probably but it's there now and we can see it and it's pretty ghastly yeah yeah and this this goes for a lot of other

books of that period the illustrations in particular and the the idea that children are innocent of and therefore a little holy and you know there's the nearer God than we are the little angels that sort of stuff it's so anti-natural, it's so anti-the-whole the whole process of growing up. Children don't want to be like that.

What children want to be when they're young is grown up. Yes, that's true, actually. I mean, Jesus says that you must come to him as little children. And the idea of the fall of Adam and Eve in Genesis is, well, it's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that they eat from. And they're in a state of sort of innocence and what Christians would see as purity. Yeah. And then in comes knowledge and morality, and this is the origin of everything that's bad in the world.

Whereas I think the inversion that you're famous for in this context is that this stuff entering the world is what makes life sort of worth living. It's good. It's unequivocally good. Yeah. Of course we can do bad things. Of course we can. But to do bad things in a state of not knowing whether they're bad or not. not isn't a virtue. Yes.

It's a defect. Yeah. And to that extent, in your fiction works, like you sort of associate the liberative stuff, that is to say dust, you know, consciousness, awareness, like goodness, love, that kind of stuff with a corrupt religious authority who wants to banish it because anything but their truth is bad. And so, you know, as well as being associated with a response to the like literature of Narnia and C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and things, you're also associated with a quite sort of this worldly critique of organized religion. And I wonder to what extent you consider your contributions in this regard to be anti like organized religion or anti the actual doctrines, belief, God belief, that kind of stuff. Or if it's more of like an institutional challenge to things like the Catholic. Catholic Church. When West Jet first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was peak fashion, inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel.

While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to WestJetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. I think I'm anti, a cast of mind, a particular cast of mind that finds a home in organised religion. Sure. Because it uses it to control and to dominate. We see examples of that in things like the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland,

in the grotesque powers that the Catholic Church holds and still holds in some parts of the world, certainly did in Ireland. Yes. And also in the equally grotesque ways in which the Taliban, for example, forbid women to go out without a hijab or forbid them to be educated. It's just grotesque. It's anti-life. It's just wrong.

You were well known during a time in which atheism and quite third. critique of religion became very popular with the new atheists, with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. And hearing you speak about the filthy lies that underlies some religious thinking and the abuses of religious power, people might expect, if they didn't know much about you, that during that time, you were alongside them, you know, holding the banners, supporting the bus campaign and doing the debates. But you quite intentionally put some distance between yourself and the new atheists, and I wonder why that is. Because they were just as dogmatic in their way as anything on the other side.

Yes, what was the bus campaign? There's probably no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life. That's right. Classed on buses going all around central London. That's right. Well, that really quite the wrong round as far as I could see. There's probably no good, so what are you going to do about it? Rather than saying, stop worrying.

I don't think anybody worries that there's God anymore. I think we've gone beyond that. We've gone beyond that 150 years ago, I reckon. That was a silly campaign with a silly slogan. And also I dislike the dogmatism. I dislike the absolute stony certainty of some people like, well, the people you mentioned. I didn't read their books with any enjoyment. I met Hitchens.

I met Dawkins. I didn't meet Harrison. Who was the other one? Daniel Dennett is the other. Daniel Bennett, yes. I read him. I just didn't like what they stood for. They seem to be a lack of proportionate, what they said, which is often a sign of a lack of a sense of humor.

Some of these things are funny. Don't get in a rage about them. Slav. There was that and the profound suspicion they had of imagination. As an example of one in Dawkins' books, I forget which. But he says, we need to know a bit of science to keep our imaginations in line. I would quote it, but you can look it up.

You quote that line and it'll come up. Why do we need to keep our imaginations in line? Are they going to do something evil? Well, yes, they are, says Dawkins. They're going to tell you so things that aren't true. What do you mean by true? Well, things that aren't scientifically provable. Now, that's a silly way of thinking.

It's wrong in so many ways. That's a circle. Yeah. That's arguing in a circle. Yes, that's right. Yes. So I was never part of them. Yeah.

And I was quite happy to distance myself from. Yeah. You know, you wrote a book called The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. A really interesting literary device of having Mary give birth to twins, to two children. There's Jesus is one and Christ is the other. And there's this sort of difference between them throughout their life. and accounting for, I guess, the sort of different personalities that show up in Jesus and also the development of the mythology. It's a really interesting text.

And inherent in it is some critique of the way in which this historical story of a man going around and doing things became this mythologized and institutionalized, like story. When you wrote that, Christopher Hitchens did a review of the book in which he accused you of being a Protestant atheist. by which he meant that having, you know, again, having a character at a point in the book sort of start spilling against the institutionalisation of what should be a very sort of personal and historical series of events. To him, I think it sounded like you were talking about the Catholic Church. It sounded as though you were almost making the same critique as the Protestants. I don't think so.

I don't think that's right. I have Jesus say at some point in the book towards the end of the story, give his vision of what a church might be. Yeah. And he compares it to a tree, which offers food for the birds, shade for the weary traveler and so on,

and finally offers up its good wood for the carpenter. And that's what the church should be. It shouldn't say to anyone, no, you go away, you're not welcome here. So that was the comparison in the mind. that was the image and the mind of my Jesus. Yes. What I tried to do with the character, Christ,

was to make him the carrier, if I could put it like that, of the virus of dogma. But it occurred to me when writing, I mean, several things occurred to me, and I discovered several things when I was writing that. Interesting to read through the epistles of Paul, for example. I mean, the ones he wrote himself, and count the number of times he's called, they refers to Jesus, and the number of times he refers to Christ. Jesus turns up, I don't know, 30 times or something, Christ turns up over 100.

So that was the aspect of this double figure that appealed to Paul. Yes. And which he basically set in stone as the nature of what should be the church. And the church has grown up after Paul. It's followed Paul. It should be a Pauline church rather than a Christian church. Yes. That's one thing.

Another thing that occurred to me was how fortunate the Christians have been in the iconology. The man nailed to a cross is a wonderful image, if nothing else. It's instantly recognizable, instantly understandable. it's recreatable in any number of artistic ways. But suppose Jesus had been born not in Nazareth. Was it Nazareth? Bethlehem. Bethlehem.

But in Tarsus, for example, where Paul was born. Now, Paul, being a Roman citizen, because he was born in that city, when he was put to death, was beheaded. Yes. If Jesus had been a Roman citizen like Paul, he wouldn't have been crucified. There had been no image except that of a man having his head cut off. with the Christian icon then? A severed head gushing blood, that would be horrible and it wouldn't work nearly so well. Christians were very lucky that Jesus was not a Roman citizen, otherwise they had a very difficult icon to flourish. Yes, of course, that's probably why they would say,

well, they would say that's why, you know, God chooses to manifest in that way to give what is one of the most powerful images in in history. But also like, I mean, you know, there's the canonical tradition, there's the Gospels and there's the authentic Pauline letters. But it felt to me like your book kind of borrowed from certain like apocryphal, like Gnostic themes. In particular, just the idea of Jesus having a twin, the Greek term didamus is used in the canonical Gospels. But also like throughout the Gnostic Gospels to imply that Jesus had a literal brother who who looks just like him. Oh, yes.

I was fascinated by a lot of the Gnostic stuff. Yeah. M.R. James had something interesting to say about that. The great writer of ghost stories was also, of course, a New Testament scholar. And he said, people say that it's only chance that we've got Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, that any of the other Gospels would have supplied something just as good. He said, you only have to look at them to see why that's not true. Right.

Meaning they're not very good. Yeah. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. of extraordinary storytellers, and they've got an extraordinary story to tell. But again, there are odd little things that sort of snagged at me as a storyteller. How did this happen? How do we know what Jesus said to Satan in the wilderness? How do we know?

We've only got Jesus' word for it. Now, he wouldn't have gone back and say, you know what happened? You know what happened? Bloody Satan came along. You know, you tried to tempt me a bastard. I wouldn't give him that. I mean, how are we supposed to understand that? that the gospel writers knew this story.

Who could they have got it from except Jesus? So where did it come from? Another story as well, it can only have happened out of the hearing of witnesses was what Jesus, what happened in the Garden of Gisemite. Who was there to hear Jesus say, take this cup from me? Quite, yeah. So there are things I'd want to question. any witness. We'll get back to the show in just a moment, but first, I actually haven't eaten today. I've

been kind of busy, and I either forget or just run out of time. It happens quite a lot. Luckily, on days like this, today's sponsor, Huell, comes to the rescue. That's H-U-E-L. This is the ready-to-drink Black edition in my favourite flavour, which is chocolate, but it comes in all kinds of flavours and different kinds. There's the original version, this black high-protein version, there's a light addition, and it comes in powdered form, which gives you a little bit of extra protein and also allows you to control how thick or thin your Hewle is. And this is actually a complete meal in a bottle. It's 400 calories, 35 grams of vegan protein, 26 vitamins and minerals, and coming in at under $5. It's high protein, low sugar and low cost. And if you go to Hewle.com forward slash Alex O'Connor, then as a new customer,

if you use the code, Alex O'Connor, you'll also get 15% off. I drink one of these almost every day. complete nutrition while saving your time and your money. And with that said, back to the show. Yes. You know, some people refer to the story of users as the greatest story ever told, to the extent that other narratives which are kind of like based around it, things like Narnia are considered to be wonderful stories. And people say, well, you know, the reason why they're so attractive and work so well

is because they are rooted in what is just the tried and tested greatest story of all time. Do you agree with this assessment? No, it is a good story, but in whose hands is it being, who's telling the story? John's story is very different from Mark's story, and Mark's story is pretty sparse and clear compared with Luke's story and so on. People have, who was he who said this to me, I think it was Frank Cottrell-Boyce who was trying to convince me to become a Christian. And he said, doesn't this prove it's true, though, that, you know, that, you know, that, you know, a law case, we'll hear lots of versions of different sides. Right.

And, well, so what? Why does that prove that any one of them is true or that they're all true because they don't, they don't agree with one another? Does that make them true? No, it makes them like an ordinary story. It makes them like an ordinary law case. It's a good story. I can think a way of making it better, though.

Yeah. If Judas had come to Jesus not to kiss him and betray him to the Romans, but with his kiss could immediately transport him away from Jerusalem into safety to a city, I don't know, like Athens or Rome or Cairo or Baghdad, several hundred miles away, where he'd be safe from the crucifixion. That's a better story because then we'd want to know what happened next. What did he do there? Did he write anything? Surely he was a wonderful storyteller. Surely somebody would have written down what he said, the more stories to tell. Just to kill him like that, well, it saves the difficulty of working out what he would have said next. And I don't know. I don't, it's, it's, it's, it's just too easy. It's too easy. And also, it doesn't make moral sense. It doesn't make moral sense. Why if Jesus is killed,

Does that make it better for us? Now, this is based on the old idea of redeeming a sin by paying the debt that's supposed to be incurred by this sin. You know, you've stolen some money from your employer, so I pay the employer back so that redeems it and you're free of sin. That's nonsense. It's absolute nonsense to say that people who had yet to be born had hundreds of years' time would be infinitely sinful.

but they're not anymore because this man was killed in Jerusalem in that year. It doesn't make any moral sense at all. I've never understood it. No Christian has ever managed to explain to me why this is a just way of carrying on. I've got two questions, I suppose. One is about what you said a moment ago, sort of improving the story. And just to sort of kill him off like that is too easy, you said. And I think we're so used to the story of Jesus and the crucifixion that it sounds like when in Narnia,

have this sort of resurrection scene, you sort of go like, oh, you know, really, you know, that on the nose. But of course, Christians will say that the story of Jesus is written at a time where you've got the Jews who believe that the Messiah is going to be this sort of magnificent warlord, and you've got a sort of philosophical culture that believes that God is this sort of eternal, untouchable, transcendent brilliance. And so in the face of both of those, you have God sort of descendant, Roman, Bruce, brutality and to be killed in that context wouldn't have been like, oh, well, that's an easy plot line. It would have been sort of shocking, scandalous, like a remarkable reversal of expectations about both the nature of God and the nature of the Messiah. And so I just want

to, when you said, like, you know, killing him off like that would be too easy. I think would that have been true at the time, you know? Well, I'll tell you what is to. He's killing him off and two days later, having him pop up to life again. Yeah, that does, that does help, doesn't it? The beheading thing wouldn't work so well if he had to carry a head under his arm. Well, and you sort of address the concept of the remaining sort of physical scars from crucifixion and the slight problem of what would remain and what wouldn't in the good man, Jesus. But I've often thought on the topic of how to improve the story, I've sometimes thought, I get why the resurrection is important and all.

But even if after the resurrection, say, you know, Jesus ascends into heaven, I thought if the punishment of sin is death, Jesus dies and then comes back to life, okay. If Jesus actually descended into hell and was being, say, eternally punished in hellfire for the rest of us, that would be a hell of sacrifice in the literal sense. And an opening to a very good story of, do we rescue him? How do we get him out? Yes, quite. What happens next? Well, you're on to you're on to something.

That's the best seller for you. Well, I think the idea would be for Christians that, I mean, I've always sort of struggled with this. It's like, well, if the punishment for sin is supposed to be this eternity in hell, then for Jesus to pay that price, mustn't he suffer an eternity in hell? And it does sort of thing. I mean, I imagine crucifixion is a brutal thing to go through. You know, I've never had to do it myself, but I think it's pretty painful. I'm not sure what death is like, but coming back three days later, don't get me wrong. You know, a pretty decent thing to do. But to save the same. 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 I thought that's what the Christian message was supposed to be about, like him taking on something super

significant. It would be more balanced. It's unbalanced at the moment. Yeah. You know, one thing that Christopher Hitchens once said, he was asked about fiction. He never wrote any fiction. and he was celebrated as an incredible writer of nonfiction. 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.

And Hitchin said he doesn't have a musical bone in his body, you know? Interesting. I think his favorite tune was higher love, interestingly, which I believe they played at his funeral. You'd think if you ask him for his favorite song, he might say something like, you know, classical concerto or something to make it sound impressive. But I'm sure he said it was that song,

you know, 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 written and composed music. Do you think there's anything to this connection? I've often thought about the similarities and the differences between music and fiction, because there are some, There are some differences.

For example, counterpoint. Counterpoint in music, we can hear it, we can understand, even a little simple thing like Frerejaka. 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 two strings at once.

you know, hint at the presence of other tunes behind the tune you're playing. But 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. Yeah. Because in a comic, you can have, well, you know, I mean the sort of complicated graphic novels here. 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 bubble. You've got a caption which might say something like 10 years later or meanwhile behind the woodshed or something like that. So you can have a kind of counterpoint. And of course you can do that with moving pictures with films as well. And a great director will have all sorts of things going on at the same time, which makes watching the film again. even more rewarding. Yes.

But it's very hard to do that with pure prose. So, 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 but he said something like there needs to be almost this I suppose he's maybe getting at a kind of like naivety or or

this just sort of ability to well I may be to imagine to sort of step out of this hyper rationality which I think you and I would probably characterize as a hyper rationality but 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 didn't know my mention. I hadn't heard of any association he had with music. You 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 Amos didn't have a musical. 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, he wasn't like, I mean, he did as much as an ex-man kind of thing, but he wasn't like 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 have a sort of musical intuition. I'm very, very interesting when I find people who are not musical. Mm. 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 of pop music. So radio one or two music. I was astounded. I don't play the piano to my great regret. Nobody says, I wish I'd never learn the piano, do they? I wish I had learned the piano.

Nobody says, I wish I'd never learn 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. instead I had the portable instrument, the guitar. Yes. And this was in the early 60s, and actually 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. I 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.

Yeah. 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? 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. Oh, 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 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, forever instead of forever just because it fits the tune. And I think that's bad writing. That's bad composition. It's just, it's, it's never worth

that. You might think, oh, but that word is so good there. If it doesn't phonetically work, you have to get rid of it. There's something very physical about it. And so, With poetry, I know that you're a big believer in reading at least certain kinds of poetry out loud, because that's how it's sort of supposed to be, and you kind of miss the physicality. Yes, 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. When you're writing, do you speak aloud? Do you see how phrases sound out loud? Oh, yes. all the time. I can't write,

and this is another thing I don't understand about some writers who write with music playing. It's impossible. It's impossible. Any other sort of noise is all right.

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 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 rhythm of the words I write because, you know, prose has a rhythm. Yeah. And I like to know what the rhythm of the next sentence is before I find the words for it. Yeah, right.

Well, that's much like songwriting, isn't it? Yeah. If you... You know, it's got to go da-d-d-d-d-dum-d-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. 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. But I'm inclined to think 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 the rest 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. 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 stories. They consider that my people who haven't understood the power and the majesty of comic books. Yeah. 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. For example, take a sentence which I'm trying to remember, I'll get it nearly right, sentence from Middlemarch. Dorothy has 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's prose to tell you that. Yeah. That's one thing you can't do. So each of these, all of these mediums have different strengths and different things they can do and things they can't do. Another example that occurred to me just now and vanished. It'll either come back or it won't, but 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 films can't? And, of course, 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. Well, 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. Yeah, quite. 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 no, seriously, yes, I was always interested.

And you're quite right about length. Until the sort of long-form TV series, a series of six hour-long episodes came along, the length was a difficult thing. You 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 scene in a second with your, if you show them the scene. Show them, they're standing on Primus, that Primrose Hill looking down at London. You can see the whole of London. There it is. That takes a bit longer if you're writing it in prose. In the other hand, when you write, you're enlisting the reader's imagination too.

And 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. 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 there are 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 stories just fall into the wrong hands. Yeah. And I've heard you say before, like, you know, 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. They'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 an illegal 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 say what? Well, what you can say is, can I see my bank account, please? Again, they bought it from you. They've bought the right to change it. Yeah, quite. And if you didn't want them to do that, it shouldn't have sold it. Yeah, 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, all the shooting and so on. Make yourself a damn nuisance. You 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, whatever? 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, well, 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 had a very good agent, and he got a percentage of all the royalties on that. Yeah, I think he was so, he so thought it was like

unsurious 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. Which, 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 fascinating. A bunch of rogues. Yeah. But, you know, I kind of want to take a, 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. 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 themes running out through your books, but also just like the context in which I hear your name cropping up. You know, I speak to someone like Philip Goff, who we both know, talking about very like analytical philosophy, consciousness and the philosophy. 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. Well, 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 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 pan-psychist idea,

the idea that everything is actually conscious, which seems to me about the most reasonable and sensible thing I've ever heard of philosophers say. Matter, how can matter be conscious? Because, well, I'm made of matter. I know that. Wherever you slice me, I'm made of matter. There's nothing else in there.

Little wisps of consciousness in there, whips 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 Mordland over there in that portrait 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 or I do a lot of woodworking and my hand knows what to do and it picks up a plane is it my hand or my brain being conscious is? No, it's my hand, I can feel it

that's where the consciousness is and this grew and became in the course of writing the Rosefield what Lyra came to call the Rose Field. Yes. 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 mumbus 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. I'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 lorry filled with vegetables, I think of Covent Garden. That's my association with it. But there it is. Somewhere in the Rosefield lies Coven Garden. My memories of going there after the work I did in, I was doing in Moss Bros just around the corner. Yeah.

That's what the Rosefield is. And the way we perceive the Rosefield 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. It'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 and 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 Lord Astros showing his lantern slides,

what's that beam of light? And he said it's dust. Yeah. And 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, like, you know, 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. They 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 fiddled 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. Do you think you have the right to change it now? I view the right, but not very good sense to do that. Yeah. You annoy publishers, you know, readers. I've got to buy another copy of this damn thing. Yes. It's a no great purpose.

Well, it's interesting that, you know, of course, with nonfiction, you get updated editions, don't you? You know, 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 the sort of present scientific understanding, in that I remember hearing you say once, I mean, you sort of draw this 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, you know.

I still have. 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 about like... Well, it's... I mean, 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 as a little like a scene at the end of Hamlet. Oh, now Hamlet's only wounded. It's all right.

We can make 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 it need to ruin the first bit. Hey, you read criticism. You read the critics. You know what the film's about.

You can choose not to go see it. Yeah. 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. It's a strange world, the world of film. It's 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 part. Fantastic amounts of money on barely credible things.

I heard the story of the prop ban for a film. Well, 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. Yeah. And he couldn't find one ever. 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. Why? 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. 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. But 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 theatre because that's how you behave. Yeah. We know that we have to pretend. Yeah.

And we're in the theatre. 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 and 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. Yeah.

We don't have the same relationship with it. That's another interesting thing, the difference between film and theatre. A film is much more like a novel. than a stage play can be like a novel. Because on stage, there are no close-ups. Yep. 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. Uh-huh. Yeah, and it applies to novels too. Yeah. Well, it does very much. Where do you put the camera is the most important question. Where am I seeing this from?

Who is seeing this? I tell people 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 sidelines? Where's the light coming from?

What light are we seeing the characters by? This is a film question, really, but it has a... helps a great deal if you're writing a scene in a novel, I think, to know where the light's coming from. Yeah. You write, you've written from 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? There'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. Yeah. With modernism, they came a great suspicion of the... Right. ...of the omniscient narrative, because who is he? He's privileged, because we think of him as he. Where's he come from?

Where is he standing? People began to mistrust the idea of this voice that comes from nowhere. Yeah. And only trust books if they were... had a clearly named and described narrator who was one of the

cast of characters. Yeah, right. I've always loved the omniscient narrator as a way of storytelling. Yeah. 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. She, 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 on 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 omniscientious.

narrator, darts backwards and forth. 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 world of, I mean, we're in Oxford right now, imagining like Lyra's Oxford and Jordan College and all the like.

And that kind of exists or was created in your mind. And you've got these little characters that also seem to have lives of their own, but exists inside of your mind. They're in the Rosefield. Yeah, I wonder. That's what I mean by the Rosefield. It's the Rosefield is where impalpable things like. 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 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 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 are you sort of picturing yourself almost in this like godlike 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.

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 goes up there. Yeah. He 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.

I'm not, I'm not like God. I'm like awesome worlds. Yeah. Interesting. I mean, the concept of writing a book as if it were a film. I sometimes wonder if because I... Well, it's been, the 20th century is full of novels that are like films because the film was there.

That's it. Yeah. Saw films, they watched films. Graham Green is a good example. He watched a lot of films. He was a film critic for a while. 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 series, 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, and there's an actor and actress poised in the act of being about to kiss. She's in his arms like this, and behind them's a long queue of people forming from the stalls, going up a little, looking at them through a magnifying glass, and then going away, get close up, you see. Yeah. Can't really do it on the stage, but this was a little cartoon

illustrating that. Yeah. 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. But 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.

it's a perfect film panorama London Lincoln's in mud fog and the fog gathers in the in the streets it

pinches the fingers of the little cabin boy on deck and it settles in the bowl of the skippers 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 part and he goes round, just like a camera would, scans all the way around the guest, 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. Well, 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 Farnity Fair, I think he says, well, our dolls have had their play. Let's fold them up and put them back in the books, 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 theatre, 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 and 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 way that the visuals are done. There's also the dialogue. Things like monologues are extremely rare in films because there are 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 took a little while before they. were, before we could be aware of all the things they could do. 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 they produced this, well, 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.

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 the circumstances. As 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, okay, I'm watching a scene on a lake.

Why, they're a bunch of violins. That's so interesting, because now we just, we don't even know. In fact, it's more conspicuous than music isn't there now in a film. We notice things when they're not right, when they go wrong, where they're badly placed or too loud or something like that. If you had a sudden burst of hip-hop, and I feel 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. Well, 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 a thing, the microphones just weren't that good. So you had to project like you were doing theater. But when the microphones get good enough, you know, this microphone's 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, by hearing aids, and I need the subtitles that. But the same thing, sorry, I keep bashing this, I just not picking up all my bumps. Yeah, okay, we'll take that. The same thing is true in a different way when you think about the difference between operatic singing and showbiz singing.

Yeah, right. Operatic singers for hundreds of years had no microphones. They had to sing again. They had to compete. overcome the orchestral sound, which led them to a style of singing which favoured the vowels over the consonants. And you've got a lot of, which you can't even know what the 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 Crosme.

Blue Moon. You know, 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. Frank Sinatra doesn't exist without the electric microphone. That's absolutely right, yes. Because we see a... 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, you know, Oklahoma, so they all sound wrong because they're singing in the wrong. tradition. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we see a microphone as like, 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, right? It's not supposed to actually do anything. And likewise, I mean, we were talking now on a stage with a large theatre there, we'd be speaking in a very different way. Yeah, and it would be like, you know, the microphone is here to basically serve like 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.

And 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 or 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 theatre and have everyone hear what you were saying. I bet you'd fake it.

There'd be ways of I mean a skillful actor It would have been trained To speak very quietly in a way That's perfectly clear Yeah 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 in a bit Are they trying to be like funky with it But I must say There was something about The genuine like whisper that 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. 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 just naturally, you're evolutionary wired, evolutionarily wired to think and being told something secret. You lean in. You're listening. Your ear turns to the side. And 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 have ideas, tips, thoughts on how to recreate that very physical, like the leaning in of the listener at the theater in a novel format? I would make it physical. I would emphasize the physical, you know, her hair tickling his cheek. the smell of her shamboe, whatever it is, you could introduce other senses to 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 what, to what extent you consider, like, philosophy, let's say, or religious ideas, to basically be, like, good inspiration for writing a good story or to be the thing that you hope your stories inspire people to go and learn like these themes of consciousness for example are you hope are you sort of thinking that somebody might read this book think

this consciousness of is really interesting and hope that they'll go and you know learn some philosophy of consciousness or are you literally just seeing it as like an interesting sort of plot device uh I suppose both really I mean I'd like um 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. My purpose in writing the story, well, it's never pure and it's never simple.

One of my purposes was to make some money because I'm a professional. all right, I don't want to 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. I am the servant of the story. I think I've written about this in my introduction to the grim tales. Or if it wasn't there, it was somewhere else. I am the servant of the story.

And I must do what good servants do. I must come to work on time. I must not come to work drunk. I must do all the research necessary to make sure that my writing hand has all the facts it needs. I must serve the story. That's my purpose in doing it. Another purpose might be to gain the good opinion of people whom I admire. If so-and-say gives me a nice review, I can pat myself on the back for that.

if um uh you know and there are all sorts of there are all sorts of other reasons for which one perfectly valid perfectly good reasons for which one might want to write a book um and persuading people of one's worldview might be one of them yeah some people swear by um writing a bit intoxicated a bit drunk what does it they say uh write drunk edit sober that kind of thing the way you said not show up to work drunk i wonder if you have have thoughts on the sort of stream of consciousness inducing states of being a little bit tipsy? Well, I don't need it very often. If I do need it, well, I mean, there are various things you do when you,

you've been working all there, nothing's appeared, and you're feeling dreadful and 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, and it is a trick, is to write a lot of dialogue. Yeah. Hi.

Hello. I haven't seen you for a long time? No, where you've been? Oh, here and there. How are you getting on? It's half a page already. All they've been done is just waffling. 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. They'll fill the page with hardly any trouble at all. That's another trick.

Is that a target three pages a day, you say? It used to be. I said it used to be because I always used for years and years all my life right by hand. Sure. And I wrote three pages, three, a four 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 days of work. Why write by hand? Well, I preferred it. I like the feeling of forming letters. gracefully. I liked the look of my writing. 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. It 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 me, you have to decide it's 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. So drying. Well, that's fiddly. That's annoying. I write a, we use a ballpoint, which never goes dry. However, COVID came along. And that had many results for all sorts of people. And one of the results that had had a 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 a 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 sort of, 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.

It would always go through a typing stage. And would you type it out after you? 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. So she'd read a passage and it would type it out. Yeah. And they only failed once.

There was a passage about some tree. I was describing some trees. And it suddenly said, rough, rough, 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 funny. There's definitely something about technology which limits, or at least changes the way that writing is done.

Yeah, it does. But anyway, by that time, by the time COVID came along, you know, I was already in my 70s, I've been writing all my life. It didn't really make any difference typing from writing. I can see it might have done once, but my style was too. I was too used to putting words together. Yes. There 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 Shee and 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. consider the rhythm and the right, maybe you 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 back and change that. It's not as easy. You can, but it's more of a fath. It's less of a fath now we have computers. Before computers, we need an actual typewriter. It was a real nuisance. But now, it's a work of a moment. Yeah. Swipe your mouse over it. And that must affect the way that people write.

It must do, but I think it would affect more people who are beginning to write rather than people who have been writing for 60 years already. I mean, the other thing that's interesting, again, this is a point that Sheehan 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 red lines selling you that there's something wrong, it would probably all. also suggest improvements. Well, I'm sure AI would, huh? Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember I saw an AI 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 cleaner. That's a very good example. It's sort of... A.I. I'm a very good example of why AI will never, never supersede the brain. You think never?

Never. In terms of anything and everything? Because the AI has no concept of the, what I called now the Rosefield. Right. The things that the contexts that surround things. Yeah. Everything is a first ever with thing, except that of course it's got to imitate something that's been written. Yeah.

Over five million pages by somebody else. No, it's a, it's a, it's a toy, it's a trick, it's a little bit, it's a dead end. I'm convinced. 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 you know or a song or score or whatever it is than to pay a human being. Yeah. And they haven't organized themselves into unions yet.

So they're still cheaper. I just, 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 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. On 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?

I 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? And 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 that you need that sort of human intuition. And within five years, it's now impossible to be to 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, because 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 the thing. It's just when I heard you say, you know, that an AI will never replace a human brain. I think that's true in many contexts. but it's just that it struck me because the creative art is probably 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. To me, it's simple. We imagine, we can imagine. AI can't imagine. All you can do is imitate. And thinking back to Coleridge again now and his distinction between primary and secondary imagination on the one hand and fancy on the other. what AI does is falls firmly into the realm of fantasy. Taking stuff that already exists and putting it together in a different way.

That's not imagining. That's not imagining. AI can't imagine. That's not what it does. What it does is imitate bits of text that already exist. You know, I think to some degree what the human brain is kind of, I mean, we're creative, like, beings. but, you know, OAS, creative beings, you know,

creative beings. Yeah, 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 XNilo. 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. What 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. Yeah.

And one of the basic impulse is, if 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, a piece of ochre discovered in the caves in southern Africa. It's about 80,000 years old. And it's got a little criss-cross pattern on it. The 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 stone and making patterns by having other lines going across them that is probably the simplest example of what a work of artists.

If you don't feel a joy in the making and a joy in the perception, because other people would have looked at and say, hey, that's good. They make one for me. No, you can do. You should show it like this. Or another pattern, drums.

Yeah, sure. That's a pattern. You 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, J, your suspicion on it, at least that. point. Philip Pullman, thank you so much for your time. It's been fun. Thank you. I've enjoyed this very much.