Philip Pullman: ‘Loosening the chains of the imagination’

The author, whose His Dark Materials trilogy alone has been translated into 40 languages and sold millions, talks about what children look for in stories.

“If you want your children to be intelligent,” Albert Einstein once remarked, “read them fairytales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairytales.” It is a sentiment with which Philip Pullman heartily agrees. Which is as well, because his latest bestseller is a highly acclaimed and high-voltage retelling of 50 Grimm brothers fairytales.

“Fairy stories,” Pullman says, sitting on the sofa in his comfortable Oxfordshire farmhouse, “loosen the chains of the imagination. They give you things to think with – images to think with – and the sense that all kinds of things are possible. While at the same time being ridiculous or terrifying or consolatory. Or something else altogether, as well.”

But Pullman, who is not only one of our greatest authors, for children and adults – His Dark Materials has sold more than 15m copies and been translated into 40 languages – but also a writer whose work teems with the paraphernalia of the folktale (witches, daemons, talking animals, magical objects), is firmly with Einstein. “Dawkins is wrong to be anxious,” he says. “Frogs don't really turn into princes. That’s not what’s really happening. It’s ‘Let's pretend’; ‘What if’; that kind of thing. It’s completely harmless. On the contrary, it’s helpful and encouraging to the imagination.”

We are talking, a couple of weeks before the release of the paperback edition of the author’s Grimm Tales for Young and Old, about fairy stories, and wondering just what it is about them that explains their enduring appeal for the young and the not-so-young. Later, the talk turns to stories in general, and why the reading and the telling of them is so extraordinarily important for children and their families. But first, fairytales. What makes them so special?

And in a fairytale, getting on with the story is all. The modern novel, for adults or for children, attempts a degree of "psychological depth," says Pullman. "It presents believable people who do believable things in believable ways. But the fairytale isn't in the business of psychological depth, it's in the business of extraordinary event following extraordinary event. Anything else would just get in the way."

Psychology, motivation, rounded character: those aren't all that fairytales leave out. They also, more often than not, neglect to give you anything you might generally expect in the way of background, context or explanation.

“Once upon a time there was a farmer who had three sons,” begins Pullman. “There you go: you’re off. That’s all you need. You don’t go into the backstory. You don’t say where this was because it doesn’t matter where it was. You don’t say what the sons were called, because that doesn’t matter either: the eldest son, the middle son, the youngest son.”

Is that what appeals to children? The sheer, uncomplicated story-ness of the fairytale, its headlong rush to an ending, its complete absence of diversion, explanation or even emotion, its unquestioning cardboard cutout characters, their ever-astonishing deeds? In part, certainly, Pullman says. But the real attraction of the fairytale for children lies elsewhere, he believes.

“I think it’s to do with justice,” he says. “Children have a profound and unshakeable belief that things have got to be fair. They like stories in which the good people are rewarded, and the bad punished. And that's a characteristic certainly of the Grimm tales, and of many other folk tales too.”

There is other stuff children love about them too, of course: “They like the golden hair coming down from the tower, they like the little girl being chased by the wolf, all of that. But if Little Red Riding Hood was eaten by the wolf and that was the end of the story, they wouldn't like it. These stories have to take place in a moral universe that we recognise as being right and true and just.”

It doesn’t matter, though, that the punishments meted out to the bad people can sometimes be rather harsh. People have their heads chopped off or their eyes pecked out, or get shoved into barrels filled with sharp nails. “All that's perfectly OK,”says Pullman. “Children, even quite young children, know these things aren’t true in a literal sense, but true in a different sort of sense. Really, they’re just funny: ‘Ooh, bet that hurt. Serve them right!

When you read a storybook to a child: “Don’t skip the pictures. I’ve seen some parents race through a book, just reading the words, one eye on their watch. The way to do it is to talk about the pictures as well – ask questions.”

But why exactly are the storybook, and the story, so crucially important? Pullman is as eloquent and as fervent as you might hope on this; the words pour forth and they don't stop. “I’m convinced,” he says, “that these – these and nursery rhymes – are the foundations of all subsequent language skills.”

“These are the fundamental things, the real basics. Our politicians talk about ‘the basics’ all the time, but what they mean are things that you can correct at the last minute on your word processor: spelling, punctuation, that kind of thing. But the most basic thing of all is your attitude to language.

“If your attitude to language has been generated by a parent who enjoys it with you, who sits you on their lap and reads with you and tells stories to you and sings songs with you and talks about the story with you and asks you questions and answers your questions, then you will grow up with a basic sense that language is fun. Language is for talking and sharing things and enjoying rhymes and songs and riddles and things like that.”

“That's so important. I can’t begin to express how important that is; the most important thing of all. A sense that language belongs to us, and we belong in it, and that it’s fun to be there and we can take risks with it and say silly things in it and it doesn't matter and it's funny. All of that. If your sense of language is that it's something you've got to get correct and you mustn't get it wrong and you're going to get marked on it, judged on it, well … That’s a pretty poor show.”

One final thought, an afterthought really but an important one, about fairytales. Our lives begin, Pullman once observed, when we are born. But our stories begin the day we discover that we have unaccountably been born into the wrong family. “We all discover that, in our early teens usually,” he says. "You have to grow up, and you have to move on. Cinderella is the template of all that kind of thing. But so many of these tales involve it, often for the most simple and basic of reasons: 'I can't afford to keep you any more.' So off you are obliged to go, in the very next paragraph. Because … well, because if you don't go, there's no story. And what a terrible fate, to have no story."

So read stories to your children, and tell them too, is Pullman's plea. In the end, he says: "It's the sense of sharing something, I think. The sense of sharing a wonder. These are wonder tales. And if you don't get all straight and anxious about them, if you let the wonder just flower and take root and enrich the child's imagination and yours, you'll be the better for it. And there we are."

Pullman is widely considered one of Britain's greatest living writers, a rare master storyteller whose books appeal to younger readers and adults alike.

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