Philip Pullman is a straight-talking storyteller

Nov 5 2010 By Lorne Jackson

Lorne Jackson speaks to a celebrated author whose views always manage to court controversy.

Many people made the pilgrimage to see the Pope during his recent visit to Birmingham.

Philip Pullman was not one of them.

There are several possible reasons to explain why the best-selling children’s author was never likely to be amongst the fervent worshipers who watched, enthralled, as the pontiff beatified Cardinal Newman.

Authors are often solitary souls. Word whittling hermits, who prefer the company of a friendly thesaurus to a feisty crowd.

Pullman is also a busy man, with plenty of blank pages to badger.

But forget all that.

The real reason why he would never dream of plodding Popewards is that Pullman is one of the most prominent atheists in the country. Right up there with Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking.

He only has tut-tuts for the true believers.

So, of course, he looked upon the Papal beatification of Cardinal Newman with a mixture of bafflement and exasperation.

“The process of beatification and canonisation is such a lot of nonsense that I don’t think it matters at all,” he scoffs.

“It’s not going to make any difference to Newman, who is dead. And it’s not going to make any difference to anybody who is alive, either.

“Except some people will have another Saint to pray to.

“My problem with the Pope’s visit, specifically,” he adds, “Was that it was a state visit and we had to pay for it.

“The Pope is welcome to come here as a private person, and be interviewed and engage in all normal democratic processes, or not, if he pleases.

“If he wants to come here and pray in solitude over the grave of Cardinal Newman, then he is welcome to do that, too.

“But my objection is when he is regarded as a head of state. Because the Vatican is not a properly constituted state.

“It was just a patch-up between the Catholic Church and the fascists under Mussolini.”

Pullman is not afraid of courting controversy, as the above diatribe exemplifies. This gruffness against God has worked its way into his fiction, most famously in the celebrated His Dark Materials trilogy of novels.

The series is about a young girl called Lyra Balacqua who lives in an alternative universe, and must battle against a repressive religious sect called the Magisterium who control society with a vice-like grip.

The books have been lauded by the liberal intelligencia, enjoyed by children and adults alike, and won their fair share of prizes along the way.

They have also been banned in schools in America and the UK.