Gotterdammerund or Bust

When you announce in advance that the story you're writing will occupy three volumes, and when the first two have been published and attracted a certain amount of notice, you begin to be aware of expectations hovering overhead — not unlike vultures, perhaps. Can he keep it up? Will it all fall apart? And: when's it coming?

Let me say at once that the people you might expect to be pressing hardest on that last point, namely my publishers, Scholastic (in Britain) and Alfred A. Knopf (in the U.S. and Canada), have been models of restraint and good sense. For whatever reason, I've always been lucky in my editors, and David Fickling, Liz Cross, Simon Boughton, Joan Slattery, and everyone else involved in the author-publisher interface have been intelligent enough to know that nagging and pestering me to hurry up and finish will do no good at all. After all, one of the reasons the third part of His Dark Materials isn't finished by now is the fact that they've kept me so busy working hard to publicize the first two, so it's all their fault anyway.

But what they've left unsaid has been said repeatedly and with various degrees of urgency, tact, and charm by readers and reviewers in numbers too great to count, and whenever I go to a festival or a conference or a book event of any sort, I know very well what the first question will be: "When's Book Three coming out?"

That part of the matter is quite easily dealt with. I point out that the story is a long one, and that I've got to tie up all the different strands, and that it's a complicated task, but that the complication is for me and not for the reader, so I must make it seem simple and straightforward when you read it, and that's even harder and takes longer . . . and so on; and people do understand, and they're willing to wait till next year, when I have guaranteed it will appear.

The harder part is the big expectations. And this is what's difficult to write about without appearing immodest. To have your book compared time and time again to The Lord of the Rings becomes wearisome after a while, when you know it's nothing whatever like that work, and Tolkien would have abhorred it; but still, it's a compliment. They're talking big. And when people with generous intentions (such as the editor of that excellent journal, the Horn Book) say, "he has to write something that MUST be monumental — given what he's set up . . . it's Götterdämmerung or bust," it's hard to know how to respond apart from by mumbling in a quiet little voice, "Well, yes, I rather hoped it would be."

Actually, there are three good reasons why I'm not intimidated by the size of the job. First, I know what's going to happen in the end. Putting it another way, the story I'm telling has a superb shape, and I know that because it's been told many times before, starting with the Book of Genesis. When the notion of writing a fantasy first came to me, however, I didn't have that story in mind: just a number of pictures based on Milton's Paradise Lost. I wanted to write a book in which I could evoke those landscapes. Then came the idea of dæmons, after some weeks of trying to get the story started. Dæmons came as a great surprise. Then, in a rush, came the thrilling sense of what I could do with the dæmons — and specifically, the revelation that I could use the whole shebang to deal with an idea that had been haunting me for nearly twenty years, ever since I read a translation of Heinrich von Kleist's miraculous little essay of 1812 on the marionette theater: namely, the extraordinary paradox that the loss of innocence is the beginning of wisdom.

So I'm not worried about having nothing to write. The second reason for my blithe confidence is the fact that this is not my first book. I've been up against deadlines before, and up against the dread of the blank page, and I've dealt with them both. On the subject of the blank page, by the way, I have two observations. One I owe to that great writer Vincent van Gogh, who in his letters points out that there's no need to be afraid of the blank canvas: the blank canvas is far more afraid of the painter. The other is a trick I came across years ago. I write by hand, in ballpoint, and I write three pages a day, and at the end of each day's work I write the first sentence on the top of the next page; so I never do face a blank one — it's already been beaten.

The third reason . . . I'm sure I had a third reason when I began to write this piece. Whatever it was, I've forgotten it.

But in a curious echo of something else, I did announce in advance that there were to be three, so here goes: the third reason is the risk itself. In physical terms, I am a devout, born-again, fundamentalist coward, but in terms of storytelling I am attracted with mothlike helplessness to enterprises fraught with risk. Doing something on this scale is intoxicating. So of course I could fail to get it right. The language could collapse into bathos. The structure could refuse to stand up, and creak and totter and fall in a cloud of dust. The characters could simply refuse to do what I intend . . . or rather, to do what I'd very much like them to, if they'd be so kind.

And of course, the world of accident and mortality could take an interest: a brick could fall on my head. I could be struck by lightning. Though in fact I've had a curious sense, since the beginning of this enterprise six or so years ago, that until the book is finished, I'm invulnerable. Nothing can touch me: flood, plague, moth, rust, snakebite, I walk like Superman through their feeble assaults. But the moment I write the words The End, I'm doomed. . . .

Which might be a very good reason for not finishing it at all.

Along with many other acclaimed novels, Philip Pullman is the author of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and . . . ???