Interview with Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman 

“If you’re interested in the world, the world is bound to affect what you write,” Pullman says.

'The Secret Commonwealth' brings back the indomitable Lyra, whom millions of readers have followed in four previous books from infancy through an adventure-filled adolescence — and now into troubled young adulthood. In the latest book, Lyra’s studies at Oxford University and interrupted by a personal crisis and a journey in search of mysterious Central Asian roses and their dangerous power.

It’s a rollicking adventure with a philosophical undertow, set in a fantastical universe. But it’s also shadowed by the specter of current events.

Like his heroine, Pullman is troubled by the world around him. A chat with the 72-year-old author inevitably turns to Brexit, as many conversations in Britain do these days. Pullman thinks Britain’s decision to leave the European Union is a big mistake. He considers ex-Prime Minister David Cameron a “complacent fool” for calling the 2016 referendum on the country’s EU membership.

Like many people looking at the state of politics on both sides of the Atlantic, he worries about “the decay of truth … “the idea that nothing is real, nothing is true, life is a tissue of improbable lies spun over nothingness.”

“You can say anything, and if you say it with enough effrontery, you can get away with it,” Pullman told The Associated Press from his home in Oxford.

“We see this very clearly in Donald Trump and in Boris Johnson. And that’s a very dangerous state of affairs. If you allow the idea to develop that it doesn’t really matter what you say because no one will believe it anyway, we’re on very shaky ground.”

Questions about truth, lies and the limits of knowledge ripple through “The Secret Commonwealth,” the second volume in a planned trilogy 'The Book of Dust,' and a follow-up to the three-volume saga “His Dark Materials.”

'His Dark Materials' introduced the world to Lyra, an imaginative, unmanageable child being raised by scholars of Oxford’s Jordan College.

The world of the books is a familiar-yet-uncanny blend of old-fashioned technology — gas lights, airships — and advanced science, of everyday worries and fantastical creatures including witches and armored bears. In Pullman’s most striking act of imagination, every human has an inseparable animal soul mate known as a daemon (pronounced demon).

Like its predecessors, 'The Secret Commonwealth' brims with perilous trips to far-flung locales, including Geneva, Prague and Istanbul. But there is also a new, adult, sense of unease. Lyra is no longer a child but a troubled young adult who finds herself estranged from her daemon Pantalaimon — effectively at war with herself.

“If we are estranged temporarily or permanently from part of ourselves, it’s a terrible situation to be in,” Pullman said. It’s also one many people who have made a rocky transition from adolescence into adulthood will recognize.

from LifeStyle