new book philip pullman

Welcome to my website, where you can find information about my  books , view my  illustrations , check out what people asked in my  Q&A  section. I hope you enjoy your visit.

Bookselling in the UK

I recently commented on bookselling in the UK, and part of my statement was extracted in Richard Brooks' article in the Sunday Times on 30th July 2017. You can read my full statement here. 

I recently gave an interview to BBC Radio 4's Today Programme about the Book of Dust. Here is a link to it.

Listen to interview

The 1,000 causes of Brexit

This catastrophe has had a thousand causes. Here are some.There is our country’s post-imperial reluctance to let go of the idea that we are a great nation, combined with our post-second-world-war delusion that we were still a great power.

A moment of peace

In 1915 pocket broadsheets of inspiring literature were distributed to the troops. One hundred years on The Guardian asked poets and writers to select the pieces they would send today. Here is one of my choices.

As a passionate believer in the democracy of reading, I don't think it's the task of the author of a book to tell the reader what it means.

The meaning of a story emerges in the meeting between the words on the page and the thoughts in the reader's mind. So when people ask me what I meant by this story, or what was the message I was trying to convey in that one, I have to explain that I'm not going to explain.

Anyway, I'm not in the message business; I'm in the "Once upon a time" business.

I was very surprised and honoured to be offered a knighthood. I believe the profession of letters should be recognised as having a proper place in the life of the nation, along with science, and sport, and music, and scholarship, and many other human activities. Many people I admire, such as Quentin Blake, Ellen MacArthur, Chris Hoy, Jacqueline Wilson, Nicholas Hytner, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Bryn Terfel, Ray Davies, Mary Beard — far too many to list — have been happy to accept a knighthood or damehood, and I am proud to be in their company.

Today sees the publication of my latest book  The Adventures of John Blake: The Mystery of the Ghost Ship.  Beautifully illustrated by Fred Fordham, the story first appeared in The Phoenix , the weekly comic published by David Fickling Books. Thanks to the artwork, as well as the fact, perhaps, that I grew up on the adventures of Dan Dare, it has a wonderfully nostalgic feel.

Eleven-year-old Malcolm lives with his parents at the Trout Inn near Oxford, across the river Thames from Godstow Priory, where the nuns are looking after a special guest. One night his father comes to Malcolm’s bedroom.

Now read on

The title of the The Book of Dust is La Belle Sauvage . It will be published simultaneously on 19 October 2017 by Penguin Random House Children’s and David Fickling Books in the UK, and Random House Children’s Books in the US.

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New Philip Pullman ‘Book of Dust” novel coming Oct. 3

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NEW YORK (AP) — Philip Pullman’s next novel will bring us an older and more independent Lyra Silvertongue, his longtime literary heroine.

“The Secret Commonwealth” will be published Oct. 3 in the U.S. and the U.K. by imprints of Penguin Random House. The novel is the second of Pullman’s “Book of Dust” series and is set 20 years after the first volume, “La Belle Sauvage.” Silvertongue also was featured in Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy. In a statement released Tuesday, Pullman said that his new novel would take Silvertongue to “a mysterious desert” in central Asia.

Silvertongue has been portrayed by several actresses on stage and screen. Dafne Keen will play her in the upcoming HBO-BBC One adaptation of the “Dark Material” books, with Tom Hooper of “The King’s Speech” fame directing.

The Book of Dust Volume Three

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The title of this article is conjectural. Although it is based on canonical information, the actual name is a conjecture and may be supplanted at any time by additional information released from canonical sources.

This article is not part of the His Dark Materials multiverse . This article covers a subject that is part of the real world; thus, it should not be taken as a part of the HDM multiverse.

The Book of Dust Volume Three is the third and final book in The Book of Dust trilogy. As of yet, the title of the book is unknown, but Sir Philip Pullman has revealed it will have something to do with roses - possibly with the name being The Garden of Roses or Roses from the South . [1]

The book will continue on from The Secret Commonwealth , taking place after the events of The Amber Spyglass . [2] In a conversation with Michael Rosen, Philip Pullman released an exclusive excerpt of The Book of Dust Volume Three which shows Lyra and Nur Huda travelling in Al-Khan al-Azraq , having left their dæmons . [3]

In July 2022, Pullman stated that he had written 235 pages of Volume Three. [4] As of August 2022, Pullman was yet to finish writing the book, stating that he was "working at it day and night" [5] , "as steadily as [his] health, [his] age and the story itself will allow". [6] He stated that it was likely to be finished around September 2023. [7] However, in mid-2023 he said it was likely to come out in 2024. [8]

In November 2023, the Associated Press reported that Pullman had written 500 of the 540 pages of Volume Three. [9]

References [ ]

• ↑ eltemplodelasmilpuerta.com (in Spanish)
• ↑ Goldsmiths
• ↑ Philip Pullman on Twitter
• ↑ Associated Press
• His Dark Materials
• 1 Lyra Silvertongue
• 2 Marisa Coulter
• 3 Lord Asriel

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The Fallen Worlds of Philip Pullman

By Alexandra Schwartz

“Paradise Lost” might not seem like a promising conceit for a young-adult fantasy novel in which people have animal-shaped souls called dæmons and the fate of the universe rests on the wiles of a preteen ragamuffin and the strength of an armored bear. But the English writer Philip Pullman was wise to take Milton as a muse for His Dark Materials , his renowned trilogy, which began with the publication of “ The Golden Compass ,” in 1995. That book introduced one of the most memorable child heroines in English literature: Lyra Belacqua, a scruffy and imperious ward of Oxford’s Jordan College, who is left mostly to her own devices until she is thrust into the complicated business of saving the world from the Magisterium, a shadowy church that wants to do away with original sin. Pullman, a lover of William Blake, is famously, ardently atheist. His novels value experience over the preservation of innocence, though that transition doesn’t come without a cost; I can’t have been the only fourteen-year-old to weep over the ending of “ The Amber Spyglass ” (2000), the trilogy’s final novel.

Pullman, who has written books for both adults and children, including the Sally Lockheart quartet , numerous fairy tales, and a reimagining of the New Testament , considers himself a storyteller first and foremost. Before becoming a writer, he taught middle school. In 2017, he returned to Lyra’s world with “ La Belle Sauvage ,” the first in a planned trilogy called The Book of Dust, named for the mysterious particle linked to consciousness that lie at the heart of His Dark Materials. The trilogy’s second book, “ The Secret Commonwealth ,” will be published in October; and an adaptation of His Dark Materials, starring James McAvoy, Ruth Wilson, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and the newcomer Dafne Keen, will appear on HBO the following month. Pullman lives with his wife and two cockapoos in Oxfordshire; he spoke with The New Yorker over the phone on a recent afternoon.

I wish I was with you, but, since I’m not, can you describe the room you’re sitting in for me?

This is the living room. It’s a smallish room. It’s got books right across two walls, and piles of books in front of them. There’s a battered, old, kind of burnt-orange easy chair that I’m sitting in. There’s a sofa across the room where my wife sits and where the dogs try and shove her out. Books, books, books, everywhere.

That’s the room. Now, the walls. There is a painting—no, it’s a lithograph, by Ana Maria Pacheco, the Brazilian artist.There’s a little wood engraving by Edward Gordon Craig. There is a little print by Georges Braque, of a bird in flight. I’m very fond of that one.There are some old Chinese plates that I inherited from my aunt, sitting on top of the bookshelves.

It sounds well lived in.

It’s certainly that.You can tell from all the clutter.

Do you have a system for organizing all the books?

No. The latest to arrive goes on top of the pile.That’s all I manage to arrange. I’ve got far too many books. Every time I go out, I accidentally buy books. Books arrive from different publishers for me to have a look at, and that’s nice, too. I must find a way of donating books to prison libraries, because that’s something that I really think should have them.

“The Secret Commonwealth” is the second in your new trilogy, The Book of Dust, which returns to the world that you created in His Dark Materials. How did you decide to come back to Lyra?

Well, in the usual way. These stories come to me. I didn’t do it on purpose. I found myself daydreaming a number of events involving Lyra and the people around Lyra. And there was always a kind of a mystery which I hadn’t settled to my own satisfaction in His Dark Materials, which is about the nature of Dust. It has something to do with consciousness, but I didn’t explore that fully, and I’m using this story, among other things, as a way of finding out what I mean by this idea.

And you find out as you’re writing?

Yes. For me, it’s got to be that way. I couldn’t possibly write a novel if I had to work it all out first. I’m writing into darkness, as it were, not knowing where the story is going or what the characters are going to discover. It’s more exciting like that. I would just be too bored—terminally bored—if I knew everything in advance.

The first book in the series, “The Book of Dust,” takes place when Lyra is a baby. She’s not enormously communicative, as babies aren’t.

And she hasn’t got any agency in that book. She’s the MacGuffin, in Hitchcock’s words, the thing that sets the plot going: the secret plans, or the unlocked suitcase, or the mysterious woman wearing a veil, or whatever it is.

And now she’s back in “The Secret Commonwealth,” and she’s twenty years old. It’s a shock, honestly, to read about her, because she’s troubled, she’s surly, she’s depressed. She’s not at all the confident heroine we remember from His Dark Materials.

Well, she’s growing up. She’s an adult. I don’t use the word “depressed.” It’s a rather depressing word. Melancholy . I think at one point Malcolm’s dæmon refers to her as bearing the mark of “Le soleil noir de la mélancolie,” which is a quotation from a poem by Gérard de Nerval which I like very much.

She’s marked by melancholy, and the reason for that, and probably one of the results of that, is she and Pantalaimon have suffered a rupture.

Yes, they’re not joined in the way that people in that world are with their dæmons.

They’re not. This was something I had wondered about for a long time. You know, we’ve had a picture of dæmons in His Dark Materials as these close beings, really an aspect of yourself. You can’t be divided. But what if you don’t like your dæmon and your dæmon didn’t like you? What would it be like then?

In the past, you’ve spoken of not so much creating dæmons as sort of discovering that they were there in your writing.

I’m sure that a very strict scientistical person would say that I did not discover anything because there’s nothing there before I make it up. But it does really feel like discovery, not invention.

If you say it, I believe it. You’re quite a rational person in spite of being an author of fantasy.

Well, reason is a good servant but a bad master. And I think it was David Hume, the English philosopher—Scottish philosopher, I should say—who said that “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.” In other words, reason is there to help us, but our governing passions are the emotions and feelings of human life, whether it’s love, or anger, or tenderness, or revenge, or whatever it might happen to be.

Those are the real governors. Reason points out all the flaws and the snags, and helps us find our way to what we want to do. But, if we lead our life according to reason, we would never fall in love. We wouldn’t look after old people; we’d just let them die. It would be a terrible thing to be governed by reason.

You’re quite famous as an atheist; the word “militant” is often used to describe your atheism. But your grandfather was a clergyman.

I was wondering what your religious education was like growing up.

I am seventy-two years old, so I grew up before the changes in the language of the liturgy of the Church of England. My grandfather was a Victorian. He was born in 1890 something, a very old-fashioned man in many ways. I loved him dearly. And the Bible he knew was the King James. That’s the Bible I grew up with. Then the church services I went to—and I did go to church every Sunday when I was a boy, sometimes in my grandfather’s church, sometimes elsewhere—were conducted according to the Book of Common Prayer, which was the 1662 book where the liturgy of the English Church was kind of fixed and formalized.

So it’s that language, the language of the seventeenth century, that surrounded me. And I’ve always relished the sounds of it. The hymns, too—although they were not seventeenth-century, necessarily, some of them are full of the most marvellous language. “His chariots of wrath the deep thunderclouds form, and dark is His path on the wings of the storm.” What wonderful language that is. I was responding to that more in an aesthetic, sensuous way than I was to what the words meant. But if Grandpa told me that God was in Heaven, and that I’d go to Heaven, too, if I was a good boy, well, I saw no reason to doubt it.

What changed?

It was when I became a teen-ager and started reading for myself that the faith fell away. But that didn’t mean that I sprang into the world as a militant atheist. What I’m against is what William Blake called single vision—being possessed by one single idea and seeing everything in terms of this one idea, whether it’s a religious idea or a scientific idea or a political idea. It’s a very bad thing. We need a multiplicity of viewpoints. So I’m perfectly willing to entertain the prospect of “The Secret Commonwealth”—this world of fairies, ghosts, witches, and so on—side by side with the world of reason. I wouldn’t want to be governed by one or the other.

Your father was in the Royal Air Force, and was killed in a plane crash in Kenya when you were small. How old were you?

About seven. I think he died in 1954.

Was that a defining tragedy? What was your relationship with him like?

Well, we hardly knew him, my brother and I. All our lives, he had been off posted somewhere else. We knew him occasionally as a large, genial presence with an upswept R.A.F. mustache and a cigarette, and probably a pint of beer, as well. He was that sort of character. We knew that he was in Kenya helping the British Empire dispose one of the groups of people that wanted to dismantle the British Empire, the Mau Mau, and we look back on that time now with horror because of what the British did—in Kenya, and all around the world, practically. But, to a little boy of seven, his daddy was doing the right thing. And when his daddy was killed, obviously, he was a great hero. That’s all I knew as a boy. It wasn’t until I was grown up and able to ask my mother and other people about it that I found out a bit more.

And what did you find out?

That he and my mother were on the verge of divorce. I had no idea about that. Another shock was having been allowed to think, as it were, that he’d been shot down in battle. And then realizing what he was actually doing was dropping bombs on people with spears and knives. I saw his death in a different light, really.

And then you found out not long ago that he had died in an accident.

Yeah. He was on a plane with someone else, either a passenger or an observer or something, and they crashed into a hillside. Now, he was a very good pilot, and he’d been flying for, you know, fifteen years. And so I don’t know why he would have crashed. It’s a mystery, and, at this distance and time, I will never find out.

What was your mother like?

She was a woman whom the war had also affected. She was the daughter of the country clergyman, my grandfather. Her younger brother, my uncle Tony, was sent to a good school and became a doctor. But, a clergyman’s salary being what it is, they could only afford to educate one child. So my poor mother, who was certainly bright enough to have got in a university and got an interesting career, never did. And she always felt deprived by that.

She did write. She wrote a great deal of poetry when she was young, during the war, poetry about dashing pilots who flew off in the moonlight and that sort of thing. I’ve still got some of them. She could have written, I think. She was a great reader. But it never seemed to work out.

And when she remarried, you moved to Australia for a while?

Yes. She married a year or two later. He was also in the R.A.F., and he was posted to Australia, so my mother, my brother, and I went out there to join him. What was most interesting was travelling by sea, because that’s the way we did in those days. And I still remember a lot of the details: the color of the sea in different parts of the world, the way the waves were longer somehow around the Cape of Good Hope. I’m very grateful, really, for the childhood I had, because it did take me to Southern Africa, to Australia, and, eventually, to North Wales, where I spent all of my teen-age years.

North Wales is an important place for you.

Very. Because it was there that I became an adolescent. I started learning to read things that I wanted to read. I started to discover that I was intoxicated by poetry. I wrote a great deal of poetry. It was also the time when such things as the Beatles and Bob Dylan were occurring. Every child, everybody who was a teen-ager in those years, was affected in some way by them.

You were a teen-ager in the best time to be a teen-ager probably ever.

I think that’s it. I’m very lucky.

And I gather that you continue to think highly of adolescence. Which is not everybody’s opinion.

Well, it’s a very interesting time. When I became a teacher, I was teaching children who were eleven to thirteen, that sort of age. Their lives were beginning to open out in terms of intellectual curiosity, in terms of emotional maturity, in terms of physical changes. It’s a complete earthquake of a time. And I’ve always thought it was very important. It’s the change, as William Blake puts it so well, between innocence and experience.

That’s one of your great themes. But one thing that occurs to me is that sometimes teen-agers can have a kind of nostalgia for their childhoods, even though they’re not that far removed from them. It’s the dawning of an awareness that, for the first time, they’re moving past an age, or a period of life, that they’re not going to be able to recover.

I suppose that happens, but I think most kids look forward rather than back. They want to be grown-up. They want to smoke cigarettes and get drunk and have sex, and they want to have a bit of money and drive around in cars.

It’s only when you’re kind of mature, maybe in your forties, or when you’ve got kids yourself, that you think, Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if I could go to bed and have a story read to me, and then just go to sleep without having to get up and go to a job in the morning. The nostalgia is an adult thing, not a childhood thing.

Talking about those changes—in preparing for this interview, I learned something that I hadn’t known before, which is that His Dark Materials was censored a bit between the English version and the American version.

Ah, yeah, I believe that happened.

Your books were very important to my own early adolescence. I particularly remember the physical intensity of reading the end of “The Amber Spyglass,” with the love story between Lyra and Will. And I’ve discovered in the past couple of days that I actually only got half of the experience, because Lyra’s sexual awakening was pretty dampened down in America.

I’m surprised it was that much altered. I don’t think it was that much raunchier in the European version.

I think there was more explicit description of the effects of hormones!

Well, this has to do probably with the publisher that I was with. I don’t think of my audience very much. I don’t think of my readership and direct my story to a particular age. But, as it happened, His Dark Materials was published by a children’s publisher, or by a children’s division of an adult publisher. And that meant various things. It meant that it was put on bookshelves in different parts of bookshops. It was sold into bookstores and wholesalers by people who knew children’s lists, and not really by adult representatives. So it had a big children’s readership, and I think that might have governed what my American editors thought ought to be done to the text.

I don’t think very much was done, but, then, as we from this side of the Atlantic have had occasion to observe, you on that side—I mean the great big “you” of the American public—are much more easily offended. Even, dare I say, eager to be offended.

I think that’s fair.

So I think people have to be more careful. With “The Secret Commonwealth,” it really isn’t a book for children. But it’s being published by the children’s part of Penguin Random House, which might mislead people. I think the people who are likely to buy this are probably grown-up, and they probably know what they’re in for.

I certainly noticed that, in all the public events that I did to publicize “La Belle Sauvage,” two years ago, my audience consisted almost entirely of adults. Hardly any children at all.

“La Belle Sauvage” is written from the point of view, or closely follows the point of view, of a child.

Well, not quite. Malcolm is at the center of the story, but he didn’t narrate it. The narrator is my old friend the omniscient narrator, who is in a position to comment on, to criticize, to see the characters from the outside, and who isn’t necessarily bound to the consciousness of one of them.

I know you’re a great defender of the omniscient narrator.

I am. I’m sorry that we, as a literary culture, seem to be losing faith in the omniscient narrator. People say, “Oh, I need to know who’s telling the story, otherwise I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know whether to believe it at all.” And another thing we see more and more of is the bloody present tense. I hate books written in the present tense! I refuse to read them. Actually, no, I don’t refuse to read them, because there have been some very fine books written in the present tense, and by design I might have used the present tense. But I think it’s kind of an abdication of narrative responsibility, because we know it’s not happening now , and she’s not coming downstairs now and looking out the window now . It’s already happened! It’s been written about and printed!

This pretense that it’s happening now is a silly thing which I can’t abide, and I use every opportunity to bore people to death by telling them about it.

I’d like to go back for a minute to education. You read English at Exeter College at Oxford, but I gather that you did not fall in love with academia.

I made the mistake that I think a lot of people have made—thinking that, because you like reading and you like writing, English is the thing to study. I should have done something completely different. I should have been an engineer or gone to a college of furniture-making and learned to use tools. I should have done something like that.

I enjoyed the reading. I enjoyed—because it was the middle of the sixties—all the hippie stuff, all the dressing-in-funny-clothes stuff, and all the rock-music stuff. But I wasn’t very good at doing the stuff I had gone there to do, which was to read critically and to write critically. I tried to change to reading philosophy and psychology, and they said, “Certainly not.”

Did you find time on your own to read philosophy and psychology?

No. I read them in an amateur way, which was what I should have stuck to with English. I should have been doing something else, something practical, something with my hands. I love working with my hands.

Do you make things with your hands now?

Yes, I do. I’ve always made things with wood. When I was first married, nearly fifty years ago, we needed a bookcase, so I bought some wood and some screws and made a rickety old thing, but it was my first go at it. And I’ve been making things ever since. Since we moved to this house, just outside Oxford, which has got a bit more room than we had before, I’ve got a proper workshop. It’s a small workshop, so I tend to make small things rather than enormous pieces of furniture. I’m making a lot of boxes at the moment, boxes with puzzle lids and things like that.

For your own pleasure?

Yes, and as gifts.

I want to ask you about Milton. When did you first read “ Paradise Lost ”? Because I first read Milton because of you.

Oh, right! Well, I first read Milton because of the exam system in English education. We had to do these exams called A Levels, which are taken in the two years before you go to university. The A Level syllabus for English contained, among other things, books one and two of “Paradise Lost.” Miss Jones, the English teacher, used to make us read the thing aloud, and she was quite right about that, because you learn far more about poetry by reading it, getting your muscles involved, and by hearing it than you do by just letting your eye skid across the page.

So we read aloud the first two books—the best two books, really. The landscape of Hell, the revolution of the devils to make war on God. It’s tremendously exciting. I remember reading a passage on how ships go “sailing from Bengala, or the isles of Ternate and Tidore, whence merchants bring their spicy drugs; they on the trading flood, through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape, ply stemming nightly toward the Pole, so seemed far off the flying fiend.”

That actually had a physical effect on me; my skin bristled and my heart beat faster. It was my first real understanding of the fact that poetry is not a fancy way of giving you information; it’s an incantation. It is actually a magic spell. It changes things; it changes you . And that’s been the thing I’ve experienced with great poetry ever since. I know a lot of poetry by heart. And it wasn’t just Milton, and it wasn’t just Wordsworth, and it wasn’t just Keats. It was also the Beat poets. It was also Allen Ginsberg’s “ Howl .” Now, Miss Jones would have fled from the classroom! She would’ve made a terrible fuss if “Howl” had been on the syllabus. I found that for myself, and I loved it.

And I did write a lot of poetry. All the way through Oxford I thought I was going to be a poet, but then I turned to narrative, to fiction, instead.

And you turned specifically, after some time, to fantasy. What did fantasy give you that realism didn’t? And when did that turn arrive?

Well, oddly enough, it was during lunch with my publisher—a guy called David Fickling, who’s been publishing me for well over thirty years now. I can date it exactly, 1993. He said, “I want to know what you’re going to write for me next.” And I remembered those lessons in that little classroom, and I thought, You know, what I’d really like to do is “Paradise Lost,” but in a different way. It turned out that David had been to school a little later than me but that he had done the same books. And so we sat there over lunch and exchanged quotations and finished each other’s lines. By the time the lunch was finished, I had a contract to write a fantasy.

What I found with fantasy was a way of saying something about being human. And, of course, that’s the dæmon. But I hadn’t been a reader of fantasy. Like everybody else in the sixties, I read “ The Lord of the Rings ” and was temporarily impressed, but I didn’t read any other fantasy.

Why do you say “temporarily” impressed?

Because it didn’t take me very long to see through it. The world of J.R.R. Tolkien is a world without sexuality in it. I can’t help comparing it with Wagner’s “Ring,” a much greater work in every conceivable way, which is actually throbbing with sexual understanding and sexual passion and so on.

There’s none of that in “The Lord of the Rings.” It’s as if they had their children by a courier or something: please send a boy child by Federal Express to Mrs. Blah blah blah. And once you’re aware that that’s missing, you can then see the other gaps in it. He doesn’t do any sort of speculative thinking about what’s good and what’s evil. The only interesting character in that way is Gollum, but it’s not interesting enough. It’s nowhere near as interesting as the books of realistic fiction that I was reading. You read “ Middlemarch ,” that’s a real story about real human beings. It’s about the kind of things that you know when you’re young and you discover when you’re growing up and you’ll learn when you’re old. But, orcs and hobbits, they don’t tell you anything at all. It’s very, very thin stuff. No nourishment in it.

So to find myself writing a fantasy was a bit of a surprise. But I thought of it as realism. I wanted to make the characters as real as I could make them. Mrs. Coulter, for example, is not just a one-dimensional figure of wickedness—she’s not the witch queen, of whatever it is, like Narnia. She finds herself, over the course of the story, being invaded by something she has never suspected she was capable of, and that’s her love for her daughter. She never dreamed she could feel that, and it’s taken over her life. That’s the great change in Mrs. Coulter that I was so looking forward to seeing Nicole Kidman embody in the sequels, if there were any sequels to the “Golden Compass” movie , but that never happened.

Yeah, why did that never happen?

Well, the film met such resistance—in the United States especially—that they decided that they’d better cut and run before they lost any more money. There was a lot of religious opposition to it, whipped up by a body called the Catholic League, among other people. And I think the studio just got nervous. There was no need for them to get nervous, but they did.

But it’s had so many other incarnations. It was very well done at the stage of the National Theatre, about fifteen years ago.

And now it’s coming back, on television.

That’s right.

Do you have any involvement with the television production?

Yes. I’ve got the title of executive producer, and I’m never sure what that requires me to do, but I’ve seen the scripts, I’ve made my comments on them. I’ve seen the designs and the sets. But I haven’t wanted to be too closely involved because it’s not my thing. It’s the production company’s thing. The script writers and the directors, the producers and the actors, it’s their story. I’m very glad to have provided the occasion for them all to be gainfully employed. But I’m kind of at arm’s length.

I’ve always wondered: Where does the name Lyra come from?

There was a hymn I particularly liked called “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today, Alleluia.” It’s one of the Easter hymns. And under the number of the hymn, printed in small italics, was usually the name of the author. In this case, the name there was Lyra Davidica. I thought it was somebody’s name, and I thought that was a nice name. In fact, what Lyra Davidica means is the “harp of David.” “Lyra” is a Greek word for a musical instrument like a harp.

That’s where Lyra comes from. I thought it was a name, but it wasn’t a name, but now it is a name, because I have lost count of the number of little Lyras there are. And not-so-little Lyras, now. I’ve signed many, many books for Lyra.

Does that give you a special satisfaction?

Yes, it does. I always put “for the real Lyra.”

About names, I saw that, while you were working on “La Belle Sauvage,” you helped raise money for relief efforts for the Grenfell Tower tragedy by auctioning off the right to name a character in the next book that you were writing.

Yes. I’d done this before, for another humanitarian charity that had an auction. It was bought by somebody who wanted me to name a character after his father-in-law, whose name was Bud Schlesinger.

As the next book I was writing was a book about Jesus, I didn’t think Bud Schlesinger would really fit into the story, nor would he fit into Grimm’s Fairy Tales , which is the book I was working on after that . So Bud Schlesinger had to wait for “La Belle Sauvage,” but there he is.

I wondered where Bud Schlesinger came from. You have all these very romantic-sounding names, and then you have a guy who might have been in my father’s high-school class.

Well, that’s that. Anyway, the same thing happened with the Grenfell Tower auction. A teacher wanted to raise some money in memory of a pupil of his who was sixteen years old. She was called Nur Huda el-Wahabi, and he started a crowdfunding thing, and they raised quite a lot of money. And I was glad to take her name, and I hope I’m doing her justice. She turns up at the end of this book, and we’ll see more of her in the next.

In this book, Lyra goes to the Middle East, or to a part of her world that resembles it, and I was wondering if that particular name influenced that narrative element.

No. She was always going to go through the Middle East, toward Central Asia. But, of course, with the world being the way it is, we do have boats laden with refugees that are shipwrecked. And we do have people being exiled from their homeland. It wasn’t a conscious decision to put that in for political reasons. It’s just part of the world that we are in, and the world that Lyra is in.

I don’t know if this is true in the United Kingdom, but in the United States there’s been a lot of talk among writers of young-adult fiction about appropriation. Books have been pulled by publishers for suspicion of causing offense. In one recent case, a writer pulled her own book and then decided that she made the wrong decision. You have characters in your books who come from very different backgrounds and races or ethnicities than yours. What do you make of this question of appropriation?

It is a very interesting and very difficult question. There are two perfectly valid ways of looking at it. One is that people should be free to tell their own stories—not only free but encouraged and rewarded for telling their own stories. The other side of it is that writers should be free to write about whatever they want. The imagination is not to be put in chains.

Both of these things are true. I kind of evaded it, to some extent, by writing about a world that isn’t ours. That’s one of the benefits of writing fantasy. But it’s a question I’m going to have to face. I mean, if we were only allowed to write about the things we personally know and witness, what are you going to do about the whole of literature? Throw it on the bonfire because it’s about things that don’t exist and never happened? This is single vision again. At the same time, I can see how people might be angry if someone not from their own culture writes stories about them and makes a lot of money from it. That is perfectly understandable. This is something we’ve got to face, and maybe what we’ll do is discover a way through, or maybe what we’ll do is discover that there isn’t an answer. We’ve got to live with this paradox.

Another variety of paradox is given voice to in “The Secret Commonwealth.” It’s a paradox of democracy—that we can only defend democracy by doing things that are not democratic. Human life is not a series of easy answers; it’s a series of messy compromises.

Right. In both “The Secret Commonwealth” and “La Belle Sauvage,” you have a secret élite trying to defend the democratic order.

Yes, that’s right. It is a paradox, and it is undemocratic. But, in looking at what is happening to democracy in your country and ours, anything’s possible. Anything that we thought too far-fetched, even for farce, is now going in our political life. The world is in a strange place.

I saw that you got into some hot water with a tweet that seemed to imply to people that you were suggesting that Boris Johnson hang himself.

[ Laughs. ] Well, I wasn’t—I wasn’t as explicit as that.

I’m simply summarizing the conclusion that was reached!

I don’t know how closely the American media are following the Brexit thing, but we put ourselves into the most appalling mess. The most extraordinary piece of carelessness, ineptitude, foolishness, folly. And how we are going to get out of it, I do not know.

Did the reaction to your tweet surprise you?

Not at all—I knew people were likely to object. But it’s a sorry thing when you have to explain that you were making a joke and explain what the joke is. Social media has amplified the human tendency to pretend that something is meant literally when it isn’t. We used to be able to use a little irony and metaphor and wordplay.

I also saw on Twitter that you recently saw “The Fast and the Furious.”

Yes! Our grandchildren were staying with us, and they’re in their teens, and we went to see it. I hadn’t ever seen Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson before, but I was very taken with him, and it occurred to me that he would have made a much better Jack Reacher than Tom Cruise in the Lee Child films. I enjoyed it, but, by God, it was loud.

It put me in mind of something that I know you’ve said about your own writing, that you feel that you’re stuck at the vulgar end of the literary spectrum.

Oh, I’m perfectly happy to be at the vulgar end. I’m with G. K. Chesterton on this. He said that literature was a luxury but fiction was a necessity. We can’t live without fiction, and I’m very happy to supply the thing that we can’t live without. If that puts me in the company of Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson and Lee Child, I don’t mind a bit.

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Philip Pullman’s New ‘Dark Materials’ Book Brims With Familiar Delights

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By Lev Grossman

• Oct. 31, 2020

SERPENTINE Written by Philip Pullman Illustrated by Tom Duxbury

In Philip Pullman’ s fantasy trilogy “His Dark Materials” every human being has a companion called a daemon who represents his or her soul, externalized and made visible as a talking animal. Your daemon can be a hawk or a ferret or a monkey, fierce or cozy or creepy, depending on what kind of soul you’ve got. It’s one of the cardinal rules of Pullman’s fictional universe that your daemon must remain physically close to you, but like most cardinal rules in most universes this one occasionally gets broken. When it does, it’s a trauma almost beyond description.

Since the last volume of “His Dark Materials” appeared in 2000, Pullman has written two more (superb) volumes of a second trilogy called “ The Book of Dust ”, as well as a few interstitial bits and bobs that fill in the odd blank spot in his vast legendarium. His latest work, “Serpentine,” is one of the latter, and as befits its title it is the slenderest of creatures, almost plotless and at 80 generously illustrated pages barely thick enough to have a spine. Set five years after the events of the first trilogy, the story finds Pullman’s heroine, the unquenchably curious Lyra, in an unquiet state of mind. She was once (in “ The Amber Spyglass ”) briefly separated from her daemon, Pantalaimon, and ever since then she’s been haunted by the question of what he did while they were apart.

It’s weird for a daemon to know something its human doesn’t, since they’re ostensibly two halves of one being. “But she had the obscure sense that she shouldn’t ask him directly; he would tell her when he wanted to. However, time went past, and still he didn’t, and it began to trouble her.” Lyra visits the home of one Dr. Lanselius, a pleasantly inscrutable fellow whom she first met in “ The Golden Compass ,” and much of the action, such as it is, consists of Lyra discussing the mystery of daemons with him while at the same time trying to conceal this conversation from her own daemon, thereby providing an object lesson in exactly what they’re discussing.

More than a charming fantasy, daemons are a rich metaphor for the relationship of the self to itself. Even in our sadly daemonless world, our selves, like Lyra’s, are both whole and divided — into the conscious and unconscious, the part that observes and the part that is observed, the part that speaks and the part that listens. “You know, it isn’t really surprising that there are things about ourselves that still remain a mystery to us,” Dr. Lanselius tells Lyra. “Maybe we should be comforted that the knowledge is there, even if it’s withheld for a while.” “There are lots of things we should be comforted by,” replies Lyra, at her most Alice-like, “but somehow it doesn’t feel very comforting.”

The good doctor’s daemon, it should be noted, takes the form of a snake, and as serpents do she whispers secrets to Lyra’s daemon out in the garden, truths that won’t necessarily surprise Pullman fans but that leave Lyra — who obviously hasn’t read “The Book of Dust” — shocked and shaken.

“Serpentine” is a trifle, but it brings with it all the familiar delights of Pullman’s work: its effortless clarity, its intelligence, its ineffable mix of coziness and darkness, innocence and experience. By the end one feels dark shadows gathering around Lyra, not because of anything that has happened to her, because hardly anything has, but because of what she has learned, which belongs to that particular satanic kind of knowledge that leaves one less innocent, and that once known can never be unknown.

Lev Grossman’s books include the trilogy “The Magicians” and, most recently, “The Silver Arrow,” a novel for children.

SERPENTINE Written by Philip Pullman Illustrated by Tom Duxbury 80 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $12.99. (Ages 10 to 12)

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Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials author announces new trilogy The Book of Dust

‘what can i tell you about it the first thing to say is that lyra is at the centre of the story’, article bookmarked.

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Philip Pullman’s long-speculated The Book of Dus t trilogy is a reality, with the first instalment set to be published on 19 October, 2017.

It will be set in the same universe as His Dark Materials - which sold more than 17.5 million copies worldwide in over 40 languages - centering on its character Lyra Belacqua 10 years before the events of Northern Lights .

Alethiometers, daemons and the Magisterium apparently all return to play their part, but a host of new characters - including a new hero - will also be introduced.

Full statement on the release from Philip Pullman:

“I know from their letters and tweets that my readers have been waiting patiently (mostly) for The Book of Dust for a long time. It gives me great pleasure and some excitement at last to satisfy their curiosity (and mine) about this book.

“The first thing to say is that Lyra is at the centre of the story. Events involving her open the first chapter, and will close the last. I’ve always wanted to tell the story of how Lyra came to be living at Jordan College and, in thinking about it, I discovered a long story that began when she was a baby and will end when she’s grown up. This volume and the next will cover two parts of Lyra’s life: starting at the beginning of her story and returning to her 20 years later.

“So, second: is it a prequel? Is it a sequel? It’s neither. In fact, The Book of Dust is… an ‘equel’. It doesn’t stand before or after His Dark Materials, but beside it. It’s a different story, but there are settings that readers of His Dark Materials will recognise, and characters they’ve met before. Also, of course, there are some characters who are new to us, including an ordinary boy (a boy we have seen in an earlier part of Lyra’s story, if we were paying attention) who, with Lyra, is caught up in a terrifying adventure that takes him into a new world.

“Third: why return to Lyra’s world? Dust. Questions about that mysterious and troubling substance were already causing strife 10 years before His Dark Materials, and at the centre of The Book of Dust is the struggle between a despotic and totalitarian organisation, which wants to stifle speculation and enquiry, and those who believe thought and speech should be free. The idea of Dust suffused His Dark Materials. Little by little through that story the idea of what Dust was became clearer and clearer, but I always wanted to return to it and discover more.”

• Jack Thorne writing BBC's adaptation of His Dark Materials

The announced was described by Waterstones managing director James Daunt as "exhilarating… for those of all ages. Other books, other authors, make claims and bring huge rewards… but it is Philip who cements the sophisticated, unique pleasures of reading.”

The first instalment will be published jointly by Penguin Random House Children’s and David Fickling Books in the UK and by Random House Children’s in the US.

Expecting enormous interest from fans of the series, Penguin provided a Q&A with the announcement, here it is in full:

• What is the title of the first story of The Book of Dust?

The title will be revealed, with the cover, at a later date.

• What is the plot of the new book?

The story is under wraps until a later date, but it has been confirmed that Lyra Belacqua is in it. There will also be a new hero, whose identity is yet to be revealed.

• What does the title mean?

Philip Pullman has said: “Why return to Lyra’s world? Dust. Questions about that mysterious and troubling substance were already causing strife 10 years before His Dark Materials, and at the centre of The Book of Dust is the struggle between a despotic and totalitarian organisation, which wants to stifle speculation and enquiry, and those who believe thought and speech should be free. The idea of Dust suffused His Dark Materials. Little by little through that story the idea of what Dust was became clearer and clearer, but I always wanted to return to it and discover more.”

• What is Dust?

Dust is central to His Dark Materials. People discover it, study it or seek to destroy it. Philip Pullman calls it a metaphor. Some say it’s dark matter; others – like the Magisterium – say it’s evidence of original sin. In the books, it’s often connected to the change from childhood to adulthood, through puberty – when people’s daemons take on a fixed shape.

• Is this a sequel / prequel to His Dark Materials?

No, it is a companion work. Philip Pullman calls it an “equel” that sits alongside His Dark Materials. The Book of Dust is a work in three parts, like His Dark Materials, and the first volume will be published this Autumn. The work can be read on its own, without having to have read the original series. This volume and the next will cover two parts of Lyra’s life: starting at the beginning of her story, 10 years before Northern Lights, and returning to her 20 years later. The scope of the third volume is still under wraps.

• Where is it set?

The book is set between Oxford and London, in the same parallel Britain (or Brytain) that Lyra Belacqua inhabits.

• Do any other characters from His Dark Materials – such as Will Parry, Lord Asriel or Mrs Coulter – appear in the new book?

As with the plot, the characters in the book are under wraps until closer to publication. However, we do know that Lyra Belacqua is central to the story, and that other familiar characters will appear alongside a host of new ones.

• Is this a children’s or an adult book?

As with the original series, this is a book that can be read by children and adults alike. It is being published by Penguin Random House Children’s in the UK and Random House Children’s Books in the US but, as with Philip’s works in general, the book is complex and multi-layered and can be read by adult readers as well. Philip Pullman has said previously that he doesn’t set out to write for any particular audience – child or adult – but that he hopes that his work will appeal to a range of readers of all ages.

• Will Philip Pullman be creating any original artwork for the new book?

We can’t say at this stage.

• What background reading is connected to world of His Dark Materials?

There are six books. The three that form the His Dark Materials trilogy – Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass – and three companion novels, Lyra’s Oxford, Once Upon a Time in the North and The Collectors.

However, for those new to the series, the first volume of The Book of Dust can be read as a brand new novel and a story in its own right.

A full bibliography can be found on Philip Pullman’s website: www.philip-pullman.com

• What adaptations have appeared?

Jack Thorne – who worked with JK Rowling on the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – is adapting the trilogy for BBC One, with production company Bad Wolf, who have worked on series including Doctor Who. The series is in pre-production, due to air in 2018.

Philip Pullman narrated an unabridged audiobook in 2007 and the BBC turned the books into a radio drama for BBC Radio 4 in 2003, with Terence Stamp as Lord Asriel and Lulu Popplewell as Lyra.

In 2004, Nicholas Hytner directed an acclaimed theatre adaptation by Nicholas Wright at the National Theatre, starring Anna Maxwell-Martin as Lyra, Dominic Cooper as Will, Timothy Dalton as Lord Asriel and Patricia Hodge as Mrs Coulter.

A film adaptation of Northern Lights, entitled The Golden Compass, directed by Chris Weitz, was released in 2007. It starred Daniel Craig as Lord Asriel, Nicole Kidman as Mrs Coulter and Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra.

• Is Philip Pullman doing any interviews?

Philip will not be doing any interviews until closer to publication.

• Is the book available now?

The book is available for pre-order from bookshops.

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The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) Paperback – November 3, 2020

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• Book 2 of 2 The Book of Dust
• Print length 656 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Knopf Books for Young Readers
• Publication date November 3, 2020
• Grade level 9 - 12
• Reading age 14 - 17 years
• Dimensions 5.5 x 1.42 x 8.19 inches
• ISBN-10 0553510703
• ISBN-13 978-0553510706
• Lexile measure HL830L
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf Books for Young Readers (November 3, 2020)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 656 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0553510703
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0553510706
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 14 - 17 years
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ HL830L
• Grade level ‏ : ‎ 9 - 12
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.06 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.42 x 8.19 inches
• #355 in Teen & Young Adult Survival Stories
• #714 in Teen & Young Adult Fantasy Action & Adventure
• #964 in Teen & Young Adult Epic Fantasy

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About the author

Philip pullman.

PHILIP PULLMAN is one of the most acclaimed writers working today. He is best known for the His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass), which has been named one of the top 100 novels of all time by Newsweek and one of the all-time greatest novels by Entertainment Weekly. He has also won many distinguished prizes, including the Carnegie Medal for The Golden Compass (and the reader-voted "Carnegie of Carnegies" for the best children's book of the past seventy years); the Whitbread (now Costa) Award for The Amber Spyglass; a Booker Prize long-list nomination (The Amber Spyglass); Parents' Choice Gold Awards (The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass); and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, in honor of his body of work. In 2004, he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

It has recently been announced that The Book of Dust, the much anticipated new book from Mr. Pullman, also set in the world of His Dark Materials, will be published as a major work in three parts, with the first part to arrive in October 2017.

Philip Pullman is the author of many other much-lauded novels. Other volumes related to His Dark Materials: Lyra’s Oxford, Once Upon a Time in the North, and The Collectors. For younger readers: I Was a Rat!; Count Karlstein; Two Crafty Criminals; Spring-Heeled Jack, and The Scarecrow and His Servant. For older readers: the Sally Lockhart quartet: The Ruby in the Smoke, The Shadow in the North, The Tiger in the Well, and The Tin Princess; The White Mercedes; and The Broken Bridge.

Philip Pullman lives in Oxford, England. To learn more, please visit philip-pullman.com and hisdarkmaterials.com. Or follow him on Twitter at @PhilipPullman.

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Philip Pullman: I haven’t been well. Covid has left me tired and in pain

The author on his new book the imagination chamber, the delayed book of dust finale, twitterstorms and the impact that having the illness has had on his writing.

I t’s rather reassuring that Philip Pullman, the prolific author of some of the most successful children’s books, is as susceptible to doom-scrolling as the rest of us. The 75-year-old, who is in the middle of writing the third instalment in his Book of Dust trilogy, has been paralysed by “distractions”, he tells me during our Zoom call. He is at his writing desk in the Oxfordshire home where he lives with his wife of over 50 years, Judith Speller, and their two cockapoos. I fear I am yet another diversion but, if I am, he isn’t letting it show. “Yay! We’re connected!” he shouts as he finally presses the unmute button.

We are just going to have to wait, he says, for the new novel

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The New His Dark Materials Book Is Minor but Lovely

Lyra is back, and this time she’s voiced by olivia colman..

Slate has relationships with various online retailers. If you buy something through our links, Slate may earn an affiliate commission. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. All prices were up to date at the time of publication.

Serpentine , a new book by Philip Pullman set in the universe of the His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust novels, is not properly a book at all. It’s a short story with its page count plumped up with numerous (charming) engravings by Tom Duxbury, much like 2003’s Lyra’s Oxford and 2008’s Once Upon a Time in the North (both illustrated by John Lawrence) but without the nifty, intriguing extras included in those books: a fold-out map, a board game, and “documents” like postcards and letters alluding to the then-forthcoming Book of Dust .

It’s also a lot shorter. Serpentine originated as an act of charity: an original, handwritten story by Pullman about Lyra Belacqua, auctioned off during the production of Nicholas Hytner’s stage adaptation of His Dark Materials in 2004, with the proceeds donated to worthy causes. The story is set sometime between the end of The Amber Spyglass and the beginning of The Secret Commonwealth , while Lyra is an undergraduate at St. Sophia’s College in Oxford, and it describes a minor, uneventful encounter that nevertheless sets up some of the most wrenching aspects of The Book of Dust .

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Lyra accompanies the crew of an archaeological dig on a trip north, where she revisits some of the sites of her past adventures, including Trollesund, where she first met her great friend, the armored bear Iorek Byrnison. There, she seeks out Dr. Lanselius, the wise Consul of the Witches, to pursue a mystery that has been eating away at her: what happened to her daemon, Pantalaimon, when the two were separated during her sojourn in the land of the dead, recounted in The Amber Spyglass .

She could just ask Pan, of course, but she worries both that quizzing him about it before he’s ready to talk could further strain their bond and that not asking will lead him to think she doesn’t care. What Lyra wants to know from Dr. Lanselius is how the witches, who all acquire the capacity to separate from their  daemons, broach the topic.

Although Serpentine does supply a glimpse of Pantalaimon’s adventures with Will Parry’s daemon while Lyra and Will are in the land of the dead, what actually happened to Pan after the separation matters less than Lyra’s growing awareness of the price they have paid for that trauma. For the first time, Pan has had experiences Lyra knows nothing about, and the pair can be seen bickering and reproaching each other with a seriousness never evident in His Dark Materials . The Secret Commonwealth depicts the widening of that division to the point that Lyra and Pan (to the dismay and heartache of many of their fans) have separate adventures. “When I wrote Serpentine ,” Pullman wrote in a statement for his publisher, “I had no idea that I was going on to write another trilogy, showing Lyra as an adult.” And in this 16-year-old story, he prefigured the painful estrangement between his heroine and her daemon that he had no inkling would feature in a future novel about Lyra’s adulthood.

What more do we learn about Lyra’s world from Serpentine ? Not a whole lot, just that Trollesund has fallen into semi-ruin after Iorek Byrnison’s departure and that the Arctic suffered climate disruptions as a result of Lord Asriel’s war. Pullman also doles out a few more details about how the witches acquire the ability separate from their daemons. They travel to what Lanselius calls “a region of devastation” in central Siberia, once the site of a “prosperous city.” But the city’s inhabitants “made war with the spirit world,” and the area become uninhabitable to any living thing.

By Philip Pullman. Knopf.

Lyra believes this “war” to be in truth some kind of encounter with another universe, obviously without the use of the subtle knife, which had yet to be created. The prospect intrigues her, perhaps because she hopes to be able to see Will again by traveling to his universe through a passage less corrosive than the ones cut by the knife. And perhaps the next novel in the Book of Dust series will take her there.

Even more than Lyra’s Oxford and Once Upon a Time in the North , Serpentine is strictly for Pullman completists—newcomers to the Lyra novels will be entirely lost. Still, the printed book is a lovely object, with the aesthetic bonus of Duxbury’s cozy, Nordic illustrations. Purchasers of the audiobook, on the other hand, get a crisp, poised narration from Oscar winner Olivia Colman. It’s a less impassioned performance than Michael Sheen’s readings of the two published volumes in The Book of Dust , but Colman’s self-possession suits Lyra at this stage in her life: thoughtful, careful, and all too aware that the true consequences of our actions cannot always be foreseen.