Books | Interview: Author Of "The Golden Compass"

This interview with Philip Pullman makes me want to read "His Dark Materials" trilogy. The first volume comes out early this month in movie form as "The Golden Compass". There's already something of an uproar among the religious intoxicated among us.
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AN INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP PULLMAN

"..For Pullman, there's a morality to good craftsmanship. As a young man he wrote verse and studied every kind of poetic metre he could—rondeaus, villanelles, sonnets and sestinas, the more complicated the better. He believes that if you can recognise rhythm and cadence in poetry, then you can do so in prose. It's not hard to see him extending the principle of good craftsmanship more generally. A bad politician is one who reaches beyond his or her capabilities, who doesn't understand how societies are constructed, and who screws things up.

After the soup and cheese, he returns to his armchair in the study and his anger mounts again, when our discussion about climate change ("without question the biggest issue of our time"), leads to the war on terror and Iraq. He says that George Bush is "a moral criminal", and Tony Blair has "a great deal to be apologetic for. Not that he ever will [apologise]. Armoured with his self-righteousness, he will never admit, even to himself, that [the Iraq war] was a ghastly mistake. A terrible, terrible error." Pullman has particular contempt for the sloganeering. He says "the war on terror" is "an utterly stupid phrase. Utterly, ridiculously foolish phrase. No one should ever have used it. Certainly no British politician should ever have repeated it.."

Continue.

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