Since the final part of Philip Pullman’s acclaimed trilogy His Dark Materials was published seven years ago, the author has spent almost as much time picking theological arguments as he has collecting awards. Now he is working on a sequel, which he says will explain his atheist beliefs more clearly.

In an interview with Literary Review, Pullman says thatThe Book of Dust will contain his response to accusations that the previous three books portrayed organised religion as exclusively repressive.

“This is a big subject and I’m writing a big, big book in order to deal precisely with that question,” he tells the magazine. “I don’t want to anticipate it too much by switching a light on the answer now. The interesting – the curious – question is, if people can be helped by something that is palpably not true, is this better than denying the thing that is not true and not being helped?”

Pullman’s His Dark Materials saga, which comprises Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, tells the story of Lyra, a streetwise young girl who travels through multiple worlds populated by witches, armour-plated bears and sinister ecclesiastical assassins to defeat the oppressive forces of a senile God.

Openly indebted to the visionary metaphysics of John Milton and William Blake,Northern Lightswas recently awarded the Carnegie of Carnegies for the best children’s book of the past 70 years; The Amber Spyglass was the first children’s title to win the Whitbread Prize.

The books have sold more than 15 million copies around the world and made Pullman, a former secondary school English teacher, a very wealthy man. They have been adapted for the stage by Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre, and a film version of Northern Lights is expected to be one of the biggest box-office hits this Christmas. It is calledThe Golden Compass, and stars Nicole Kidman and Dakota Blue Richards, 13, a first-time screen actress from Brighton, as Lyra.

There has been much speculation about the contents of The Book of Dust. It was rumoured originally to be a reference book to guide readers around Lyra’s worlds, but it is now expected to be a novel. Pullman confirmed in 2003 that it would develop a storyline fromLyra and the Birds, set a few years after the end of The Amber Sypyglass and included in Lyra’s Oxford, a small companion volume to the original books.

In this month’s issue of Literary Review, Pullman describes how the idea for the trilogy sprang from the character of Lyra rather than from a desire to write about religion. “I originally wanted to write a story about a girl who goes into a room where she shouldn’t be and has to hide when someone comes in and by chance overhears something she’s not supposed to hear.”

When he then imagined her with a daemon, the expressive animal companions that many readers believe are Pullman’s cleverest invention, “that was the point at which I realised that I’d got hold of a story somehow that I could use – no, you don’t use a story – that I could explore.

“The religious theme evolved as part of what Lyra has to struggle against and give up.”

That religious theme drew heavily from On the Marionette Theatre, an essay by the 19th-century Prussian playwright Heinrich von Kleist, which had made a profound impression on Pullman 15 years earlier.

“Everything that I managed to say in 1,300 pages is in that essay. Kleist says we exist on a spectrum that goes from the unconscious to the fully conscious, and once we’ve left unconscious grace behind we can’t go back, we can only go on – through life, through education, through suffering, through experience to the thing we come to call wisdom, which is right at the other end of the spectrum.

“Of course, as they used to say in the First World War, there are no atheists in foxholes. But if you’re in the habit of thinking honestly about what you do, can you leave that honesty behind when you’re in a foxhole? It’s very difficult – much more difficult to contain that state of mind than to be a simple believer.”

Finding religion between the lines

Peanuts
Charlie Brown and company may seem a million miles from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John but, according to Robert Short’s 1965 work The Gospel According to Peanuts, the cartoons often took the form of modern-day parables

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
C. S. Lewis’s fantasy is often considered a Christian allegory in which Aslan, the lion, sacrifices himself for Edmund

Harry Potter
The Hogwarts magician has made an enemy of American evangelists, who consider the books ungodly, but Scott Moore, Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University, Texas, argued that the climax of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was classic Christian allegory

Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Swift’s opus is a satire on man’s pride and original sin, where the Yahoos represent the avarice of Englightenment England

*Source: Times database

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