Philip Pullman: the most dangerous author in Britain

Philip Pullman is a writer, author of a number of books mostly aimed at older children, including I was a Rat, The Ruby in the Smoke, The Shadow in the North, The Tiger in the Well and The Tin Princess. But he is best known for His Dark Materials - a trilogy of books centred on a young girl Lyra who lives in another world and finds herself caught up in the most ambitious plan ever conceived by a human being - the destruction of God himself.

This anti-Christian stance (which is nowhere near as obvious in most if not all of his other books) has brought Pullman into the firing line for a lot of criticism. 'The most dangerous author in Britain' was Peter Hitchens' description of him in The Mail on Sunday.

Who is Philip Pullman?

Philip Pullman was born in 1946 in Norwich. He was the son of RAF fighter pilot who was shot down and killed in Rhodesia seven years later during the Mau Mau rebellion. In an interview on Amazon.com, Pullman says,

'Peter Dickinson and I were talking one day and this subject came up and we agreed how strange it was that so many children's authors had lost one or both parents in their childhood. My father died in a plane crash when I was seven, and naturally I was preoccupied for a long time by the mystery of what he must have been like.'

His mother remarried two years later to another RAF pilot, and Philip and his brother moved to Australia with them for 18 months. This early experience of travelling long distances by sea, and then living in a very different place, had a significant impact on Philip and his subsequent writing.

He came back to school in Britain - a prep school in London, and then boarding school in north Wales. It was not easy being a new boy at school - particularly when feeling rather rootless. But His English teacher at secondary school, Enid Jones, was a major influence on Philip Pullman. She introduced him to John Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost when he was sixteen and he fell in love with it:

'I found it intensely enthralling, not only the actual story. . . but also the landscapes, the power of the poetry and the extraordinary majesty of the language.'

Another significant figure in Philip Pullman's childhood was his grandfather:

'My grandfather was a clergyman, a Church of England rector in a parish in Norfolk. I spent a lot of my childhood in his household, because my father died when I was seven. We were brought up quite a lot by my grandfather. This involved, of course, going to church and going to Sunday School and listening to Bible stories and all the rest of it.

'He was a very good, old-fashioned country clergyman and a wonderful storyteller, too. He knew all the stories that one should know from the Bible. So it was a very familiar part of my background and it was something that one didn't question. Grandpa was the rector, Grandpa preached a sermon and of course God existed - one didn't even thinking of questioning it.' (interview with Susan Roberts on fish.co.uk)

But in time Philip Pullman lost any he had confidence in this:

'Then, of course, as I grew up and began to look around and see how other people thought about things, and read books and so on, naturally I began to question this, as people do. And I eventually came - after a lot of swinging this way and that, and trying things out - to the position I hold now.' (Interview with Susan Roberts, fish.co.uk)

Pullman's position is that he rejects any belief in God. He acknowledges that God may be out there somewhere, but insists that he has seen no evidence for his existence:

I know full well that the total amount of the things I know is a tiny little pinprick of light compared with the vast unlimited darkness that surrounds it - which is all the things I don't know. I don't know more than a tiny fragment of what it's possible to know about this world. As for what goes on outside it in the rest of the universe, it's a vast darkness full of things that I don't know. Now, somewhere in the things that I don't know, there may be a God.

But if we come down - like coming close up with a camera - getting closer and closer to this little pinprick of light, so that it begins to expand and gets bigger and bigger until we find ourselves inside it. . . I can see no evidence in that circle of things I do know, in history, or in science or anywhere else, no evidence of the existence of God.

So I'm caught between the words 'atheistic' and 'agnostic'. I've got no evidence whatever for believing in a God. But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know. So maybe there is a God out there. All I know is that if there is, he hasn't shown himself on earth.

But going further than that, I would say that those people who claim that they do know that there is a God have found this claim of theirs the most wonderful excuse for behaving extremely badly. So belief in a God does not seem to me to result automatically in behaving very well. (Interview with Susan Roberts, fish.co.uk)

He is now a supporter of the British Humanist Association and the National Secular Society

Philip studied English at Exeter College, Oxford, which was later to form the basis for Jordan College in His Dark Materials. After graduating he worked in the gents' outfitters, Moss Bros, and as a librarian before training as an English teacher. He taught in middle schools (ages 9-13) until 1986. From 1988 until 1996 he was a part time lecturer at Westminster College, Oxford. While he was teaching he wrote a number of plays, and started writing books.

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