NOTES ON A VOICE: PHILIP PULLMAN

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In a new series, Intelligent Life analyses the style of a well-loved author. Tim de Lisle gets the ballpoint rolling with a close look at Philip Pullman ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Spring 2010

Almost 150 years ago, Matthew Arnold, then professor of poetry at Oxford, gave a series of lectures, “On Translating Homer”. One point he made, about Homer’s essential qualities, has echoed down the ages. “He is eminently rapid; he is eminently plain and direct…in his syntax and his words…[and]…in his matter and ideas; and...he is eminently noble.”

Rapid, plain and direct: there is a writer of epic narrative, living near Oxford now, whose work is all this. Strip away the Victorian snobbery and Arnold could be issuing a blueprint for Philip Pullman.

Pullman has a new book out, a life of Jesus. But his masterpiece, “His Dark Materials” (1995-2000), has never gone away. It is widely recognised as an all-time classic. The pleasure lies not just in the parallel worlds he conjures up, or the odyssey of his heroes, Lyra and Will, but in the stamp of his prose.

Golden rule

Pullman writes in pictures, making ideas vivid. His thinking stays under the surface, working away like the legs of a swan.

Key decisions

(1) Making Lyra 12 – the age, Pullman has said, when “we realise we were born into the wrong family”. (2) Writing not one book but three: 1,200 pages, a giant canvas, made for flights of fancy. (3) Inventing daemons, the creatures that accompany people in Lyra’s world, embody their souls and, in the children’s case, morph to match their mood. The daemons turn thoughts into dialogue, and charm younger readers: this is an epic tale with aspects of a petting zoo.

Strong points The story comes first, making for crisp, declarative sentences of the kind Orwell advocated (he would have loved Pullman). Verbs and nouns do the heavy lifting; Pullman uses few adverbs, unlike J.K. Rowling, who, for all her popularity, is harder to read aloud. He writes with his ears: “often I know the rhythm of the next sentence before the content.”

Favourite tricks

Pullman is not a tricksy writer, but he has one little flourish: a pair of adjectives without a comma. “She laid it on the table, and she sensed John Faa’s massive simple curiosity and Farder Coram’s bright flickering intelligence…” Most writers would put two commas in, and slow the sentence down.

Role models

The title is from Milton. The opening line (“Lyra and her daemon...”) echoes Virgil, as does Lyra’s visit to the dead. The style leans on the King James Bible: as a child, Pullman loved “the thunderous power and majesty of the language”.

Typical sentence

“His daemon gave a soft brief squawk.” Pullman, once a teacher, used to tell his class a story on Friday afternoons, which taught him not to bore children or talk down to them. He is happy to use words like “calibrated” and “galvanised”. But he prefers words like “soft” and “squawk”: rapid, plain and direct.

Tim de Lisle is editor of Intelligent Life.

Illustration: Kathryn Rathke

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Comments

This idea is fantastic.

March 31, 2010 - 18:19 — Visitor (not verified)

This idea is fantastic.

Saying that for Pullman the

May 19, 2010 - 15:19 — Visitor (not verified)

Saying that for Pullman the "story comes first" offers him the wrong praise. Pullman's books are didactic, even polemical exercises concerned with ideas. I can think of whole chapters of the trilogy whose only purpose was to force a few marginal chracters to explain Pullman's intricate and domineering plot. It stuns me that anyone could read Pullman and then comment: "the story comes first." Nothing could be less typical of Pullman's writing. I would have to think very hard to think of even one modern author of note who has written in a manner so explictly didactic or as contemptuous of the "show, don't tell" principle as Pullman.

The article's author offers a perfect example above: '“She laid it on the table, and she sensed John Faa’s massive simple curiosity and Farder Coram’s bright flickering intelligence…” Most writers would put two commas in, and slow the sentence down.'

But suppressing the commas is necessary here precisely because the sentence has already been slowed down -- by the author taking such pains to instruct the reader about character traits which are not evident in the scene (or anywhere else). This is very typical of Pullman's style. It makes me long for the light touch of Rowling, the lack of intellectual pretense in Bradbury or even Asimov, and the effective, purposeful use of language and situation in any story by Ursula Le Guin.

For a genuine instance of a didactic author who was nevertheless able to let stories into the driver's seat there is no better example than C.S. Lewis, who managed to render his pedantic streak palatable by means of stories that genuinely move. Pullman's stories are creaky fabrications that rely on arduously marketed moments of dazzle to prevent the reader from chucking them against the wall... Disclosure: I did chuck my copy against the wall; further disclosure: I am an aetheist. That's right: an aetheist found C.S. Lewis less ham-handed than Philip Pullman.