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When Pullman began to write Lyra’s adventure in 1993, the world was a very different place. He looks back on the creation of his alternative Brytain by Philip Pullman, English novelist.
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Philip Pullman at his home near Oxford.
Photo: Suki Dhanda/The Observer
It was 1993 when I thought of Lyra and began writing His Dark Materials. John Major was prime minister, the UK was still in the EU, there was no Facebook or Twitter or Google, and although I had a computer and could word-process on it, I didn’t have email. No one I knew had email, so I wouldn’t have been able to use it anyway. If I wanted to look something up I went to the library; if I wanted to buy a book I went to a bookshop. There were only four terrestrial TV channels, and if you forgot to record a programme you’d wanted to watch, tough luck. Smart phones and iPads and text messaging had never been heard of. The announcers on Radio 3 had not yet started trying to be our warm and chatty friends. The BBC and the National Health Service were as much part of our identity, of our idea of ourselves as a nation, as Stonehenge.
Twenty-seven years later I’m still writing about Lyra, and meanwhile the world has been utterly transformed.To some extent, my story was protected from awkward change because I set it in a world that was not ours...
The only stories I could write confidently were set in this world at another time (the Sally Lockhart series, set in the 1870s and 80s), or fairy tales (Clockwork, The Firework-Maker’s Daughter, and so on), or at our own time in another world: the kind of thing that became His Dark Materials. I hoped this new venture would turn out to let me write realistically about human beings while making up whatever they needed by way of a world to live and breathe and move and work in.
