I wrote this a long time ago, so long ago I think I tried to have it printed in the college magazine. As I start to work again on study materials for more exhaustive work on my favorite author, I remembered it, and how I'd already begun, a long time ago, my quixotic apprenticeship.
Reading Around
The Golden Compass is my favorite book by anyone alive. It is fairly popular, there is a movie coming out, and for these and other superficial reasons you will sometimes see it mentioned beside Harry Potter. I read it for the first time when I was little, and then the next two books that complete the story, and then all three over again after a few years. Nowadays I listen to a passage here or there of The Golden Compass, which, as I say, is my favorite, read by the author and a full cast, on my ipod. I like to go to readings at the Lit House and play it on speakers.
Well, you can find out about the book best by reading it, you know how I feel about it. What I want to do here, rather than review it, is to go about trying to place the story within a map of ideas, to catch it in a web of them, to wrap it in a blanket of them. That is what I mean by reading around. If you like this kind of article, we could make it into a regular column. I would like it if people shared books and families of books that they know well and like—books and ideas make a community, just as we make a community of readers and writers.
In the case of The Golden Compass, some of these relations are fairly obvious—mentioned already are its siblings, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, and Harry Potter as a kind of rival. (His avowed rival, however, is C.S. Lewis, whom he reads, somewhat bitingly, as a religious fundamentalist.) It has been remade into other media, film and audio, and there was also a theatre version some years back.
Reading Around
The Golden Compass is my favorite book by anyone alive. It is fairly popular, there is a movie coming out, and for these and other superficial reasons you will sometimes see it mentioned beside Harry Potter. I read it for the first time when I was little, and then the next two books that complete the story, and then all three over again after a few years. Nowadays I listen to a passage here or there of The Golden Compass, which, as I say, is my favorite, read by the author and a full cast, on my ipod. I like to go to readings at the Lit House and play it on speakers.
Well, you can find out about the book best by reading it, you know how I feel about it. What I want to do here, rather than review it, is to go about trying to place the story within a map of ideas, to catch it in a web of them, to wrap it in a blanket of them. That is what I mean by reading around. If you like this kind of article, we could make it into a regular column. I would like it if people shared books and families of books that they know well and like—books and ideas make a community, just as we make a community of readers and writers.
In the case of The Golden Compass, some of these relations are fairly obvious—mentioned already are its siblings, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, and Harry Potter as a kind of rival. (His avowed rival, however, is C.S. Lewis, whom he reads, somewhat bitingly, as a religious fundamentalist.) It has been remade into other media, film and audio, and there was also a theatre version some years back.
We can tie the discussion into the “Storytelling in the Digital Age” theme by taking a look at the author’s website. (There are any number of fan sites, which make up a topic to themselves.) Philip-pullman.com has pictures Pullman drew for the chapter headings, a very occasionally-updated blog, and his thoughts on writer’s block and woodcarving. You may discover, if you read around, that he is a fan of the Sonata Reminiscenza of Medtner, and has sworn off air travel out of concern about the environment. There are also a couple of excellent essays which I want to recommend. They are pretty long, but very worthwhile.
“Miss Goddard’s Grave” is the text of a lecture Pullman was invited to give somewhere over there in Britain. It would be amazing if we could bring him to speak here; I would personally row him up the river… The speech is a meditation on literature, morality and education—more than a meditation, because it makes a definite argument. Some of the key ideas have to do with the value of experience over theory, interpretation over absolutes, enjoyment over drudgery. Thoughtfully worked out, these assertions link literature to the rest of life in a way too often overlooked, when it is treated as a school subject and a chore. But there is a certain blindness in the argument. It might not necessarily be stories that are fascinating to everyone, and the basis of growing as human beings. Couldn’t it be almost anything else—play, conversation, walking around—so long as its value were recognized? I think Pullman is aware of his prejudices in this regard and others, but still I would like to ask him about it.
The other essential piece is the autobiographical sketch “I have a feeling this all belongs to me”. Again, it is a window onto the way art and life are connected, this time going the other way around, experience into writing. The “ghostly hum” of electricity from the shed in Africa, learning from a sailor how to sweep the floor, “waterfall climbing” in Wales—all this is familiar to a careful reader of the big trilogy, and all the rest must have had its bearing less directly. Interesting to contemplate is to what extent writing this sketch brought some of these ideas to the forefront of his mind as he was setting to work.
Some of the major literary influences are mentioned in it, too. Milton’s Paradise Lost and Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience are the material Pullman is proud to have stolen from—he calls himself in several interviews a “crow stealing shiny bits of story”. Also present is Keats’ “negative capability,” characterized this time as “butterfly soup”. Quotations, themes, style—all fall under the debt. Then there are more obscure references. I have tried without too much success to look up the traveling poet Nick Messenger. The comic books and fairy tales have their bearing, too, as besides His Dark Materials Pullman has written lots of smaller stories that resemble both genres. I forget just now where I found this out, but an essay by Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre,” is another acknowledged source. It gave me chills to read it—the fencing with the bear comes whole-cloth, and the alternative theology of grace is shared in large part.
Emil and the Detectives, The Moomin stories, The Magic Pudding—these are some children’s books that Pullman cites here and there as favorites. I’m sorry I can’t describe them as I should, I’ve kept you long enough, and I’ve spent enough time writing this little appreciation-bibliography. I just keep getting distracted, reading all these things over again… Well, in the introduction to a new edition of The Magic Pudding, Pullman tells us about its author, Norman Lindsay, and the wowsers: “ ‘Wowser’ is the Australian word for a prim, narrow-minded, pompous, Puritanical, humorless, spoilsport sort of character…Lindsay loved to annoy the wowsers, and did it with great success all his long life. He fought them on principle, as the Puddin’-Owners fought the Puddin’-Thieves.” Pullman, of course, is a Puddin’-Owner himself. He’s clearly in the company of a Lindsay, a Dahl, and probably—why not?—can hope to go down one day with Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, those great eaters and generous feeders of the human heart.
“Miss Goddard’s Grave” is the text of a lecture Pullman was invited to give somewhere over there in Britain. It would be amazing if we could bring him to speak here; I would personally row him up the river… The speech is a meditation on literature, morality and education—more than a meditation, because it makes a definite argument. Some of the key ideas have to do with the value of experience over theory, interpretation over absolutes, enjoyment over drudgery. Thoughtfully worked out, these assertions link literature to the rest of life in a way too often overlooked, when it is treated as a school subject and a chore. But there is a certain blindness in the argument. It might not necessarily be stories that are fascinating to everyone, and the basis of growing as human beings. Couldn’t it be almost anything else—play, conversation, walking around—so long as its value were recognized? I think Pullman is aware of his prejudices in this regard and others, but still I would like to ask him about it.
The other essential piece is the autobiographical sketch “I have a feeling this all belongs to me”. Again, it is a window onto the way art and life are connected, this time going the other way around, experience into writing. The “ghostly hum” of electricity from the shed in Africa, learning from a sailor how to sweep the floor, “waterfall climbing” in Wales—all this is familiar to a careful reader of the big trilogy, and all the rest must have had its bearing less directly. Interesting to contemplate is to what extent writing this sketch brought some of these ideas to the forefront of his mind as he was setting to work.
Some of the major literary influences are mentioned in it, too. Milton’s Paradise Lost and Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience are the material Pullman is proud to have stolen from—he calls himself in several interviews a “crow stealing shiny bits of story”. Also present is Keats’ “negative capability,” characterized this time as “butterfly soup”. Quotations, themes, style—all fall under the debt. Then there are more obscure references. I have tried without too much success to look up the traveling poet Nick Messenger. The comic books and fairy tales have their bearing, too, as besides His Dark Materials Pullman has written lots of smaller stories that resemble both genres. I forget just now where I found this out, but an essay by Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre,” is another acknowledged source. It gave me chills to read it—the fencing with the bear comes whole-cloth, and the alternative theology of grace is shared in large part.
Emil and the Detectives, The Moomin stories, The Magic Pudding—these are some children’s books that Pullman cites here and there as favorites. I’m sorry I can’t describe them as I should, I’ve kept you long enough, and I’ve spent enough time writing this little appreciation-bibliography. I just keep getting distracted, reading all these things over again… Well, in the introduction to a new edition of The Magic Pudding, Pullman tells us about its author, Norman Lindsay, and the wowsers: “ ‘Wowser’ is the Australian word for a prim, narrow-minded, pompous, Puritanical, humorless, spoilsport sort of character…Lindsay loved to annoy the wowsers, and did it with great success all his long life. He fought them on principle, as the Puddin’-Owners fought the Puddin’-Thieves.” Pullman, of course, is a Puddin’-Owner himself. He’s clearly in the company of a Lindsay, a Dahl, and probably—why not?—can hope to go down one day with Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, those great eaters and generous feeders of the human heart.
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The Magic Pudding
The Moomins
BB
Milton
Blake
The King James Bible
The Book of Common Prayer
Emil and the Detectives
Emil and the Three Twins
The Lost Words
A Voyage to Arcturus
Medtner, Sonata Reminiscenza
Nicholas Messenger
Kleist
Derrida
Marx
Kierkegaard
Nietzsche
The Secret Commonwealth, by Robert Kirk
Russell
The Lost Words
A Voyage to Arcturus
Medtner, Sonata Reminiscenza
Nicholas Messenger
Kleist
Derrida
Marx
Kierkegaard
Nietzsche
The Secret Commonwealth, by Robert Kirk
Russell
Kipling
The Outsider, by Colin Wilson
Frances Yates
Ginsberg
George Eliot
Alexandria Quartet
McGilchrist
Chips Channon’s diaries; Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series; Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus; Dick Davis’s translation of the Shahnameh; Don Paterson’s new collection, The Arctic; Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song; Mary Midgley’s The Owl of Minerva, etc, etc. - These listed in The Guardian
https://radicalreads.com/philip-pullman-favorite-books/
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