Dmon Geezer Essay Research Paper Dmon geezerThere

D.mon Geezer Essay, Research Paper

D.mon geezerThere’s a story Philip Pullman tells to illustrate what he’s about. Many years ago, on holiday, he decided to amuse his five-year-old son, Tom, by giving him a version of the Odyssey every night. ‘By the end of the story, Tom, who was sitting with a glass in his hand, was so galvanised he bit a chunk out of the glass. That’s the power of storytelling. Thank you Homer.’The author of The Amber Spyglass likes to place himself in the oral tradition, and is only too happy to acknowledge literary forebears such as Milton, Blake, Swift and Dickens. To Pullman, stories are simply part of our collective inheritance. ‘What I am given is the story. What I have to contribute is my telling of it.’Everything about Pullman’s childhood contributed to the making of a master storyteller. He was born in Norwich in 1946, son of an RAF fighter pilot. He and his younger brother were living in southern Rhodesia when Pullman senior was killed in action, flying a sortie against Mau Mau terrorists in Kenya. Philip was just seven years old.His mother’s remarriage took him to Australia in the 1950s where he discovered Batman and Superman, and became liberated from English fictional models. In an uncanny echo of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter, this late child of empire then found himself shipped home to an English prep school, a voyage that inspired a taste for epic worlds.Like many children sent away to school he found an emotional anchor in his grandfather, a Norfolk clergyman, who ‘took us to church on Sunday and told us Bible stories’. At school, he acquired the habit of improvising stories, of finding comfort in a parallel universe that’s stayed with him ever since. He retains the slight detachment of the fatherless boy. And having lost faith in Christianity he has sought an alternative in the adjacent world of his fiction.After reading English at Oxford, Pullman stayed on there, working briefly for Moss Bros, and then as a librarian. Later, he trained to become a teacher. Some of his utterances to the press in recent years have had the didactic contrariness of the ex-schoolteacher.From 1972 he taught pre-teenage children at two Oxford schools. He also wrote school plays. The distinguished children’s author-illustrator Shirley Hughes comments on the ‘extraordinary range of [Pullman’s] reading in mythology, literature and the Bible’.Pullman adapted some of this storytelling into fiction. He learned that it was possible to make what Hughes calls ‘this incredible demand on the reader’ and – if the narrative was right – to get away with it. In the aftermath of winning the Whitbread Prize, Pullman told The Observer that his audience ‘does not consist just of children, but does of course include children’. The inferior status of the children’s book writer in the English literary class system plainly rankles.In 1983, having published two unsuccessful novels, Pullman completed a ‘pastiche Victorian thriller’, based on ideas he had explored as a teacher. His agent sent it to David Fickling, a young editor in the children’s department of Oxford University Press. ‘I read it at one go,’ Fickling recalls. ‘It was as good as Wilkie Collins. And it had what his work always has, which is an amazing economy – the best result by the shortest route.’The Ruby in the Smoke (1985) established Pullman as a children’s writer to watch. Then came Northern Lights (1995 – later The Golden Compass), the first volume in a projected trilogy which, taking title and inspiration from Milton, Pullman christened His Dark Materials. This, says Fickling, was ‘unbelievably original… and if the world didn’t think it was amazing, I should have been very surprised.’Pullman’s trilogy contains many of the familiar elements of fantasy and adventure novels: juvenile heroes who undergo life-threatening and character-forming trials; an epic struggle between good and evil; love and hatred; and a cliffhanging narrative.His work is bursting with big ideas and with answers to his passionate demand that children’s literature should be about grown-up things: Where did we come from. Where do we go. What is our purpose as human beings, and how should we conduct our lives.Pullman also gives his readers angels of immense spiritual purity who happen to like Kendal Mint Cake, tiny creatures called Gallivespians, nice witches, and (his most celebrated invention) ‘dæmons’ – the outward manifestation of our inner lives in animal form.He exposes his characters to page-turning adventures. ‘Children aren’t interested in irony and cleverness,’ he has said. ‘They want the story, what happened next.’But the early Nineties was not a good time to be writing for children who, it was widely held, were only interested in video games and cartoons. Pullman achieved his first big moment of recognition, with the award of the Carnegie Prize in 1995.It was then that he broke cover, accepting the prize with the widely-quoted assertion that ‘only in children’s literature is the story taken seriously’. Pullman’s undiplomatic candour (what some have described as ‘a mixture of charm and awkwardness’) is the residue of his years in the literary wilderness.While the as-yet-uncompleted trilogy grew in reputation, the literary tide turned in favour of writers for children. Rowling achieved her astonishing audience; Tolkien was rediscovered; and Pullman became published in America (where he is known as an author for adults), and France and Germany (