Of Stories and Storytellers

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From The Wall Street Journal:

 In 2002,Philip Pullman made a writerly confession to an audience in Oxford, England. “Your nature,” he said, “the nature of your particular talent, is rarely as balanced as your intentions, and I realised some time ago that I belong at the vulgar end of the literary spectrum.” Vulgar is not perhaps the word that first springs to mind in connection with Mr. Pullman, but at the time the author of the “His Dark Materials” trilogy was still wrestling with the discovery that his talents lay in fantasy, a genre he held in low esteem. “I had thought (and I do still think) that the most powerful, the most profound, the greatest novels I’d read were examples of realism, not of fantasy,” he explains in “Daemon Voices”, a splendid collection of two decades of the author’s reflections on stories and storytelling.

Mr. Pullman was able to overcome his embarrassment at writing fantasy, he writes, by seeking to infuse his stories with realism and moral truthfulness. It’s what the muse required: “You have to do what your imagination wants, not what your fastidious literary taste is inclined towards, not what your finely honed judgement feels comfortable with, not what your desire for the esteem of critics advises you to. Good intentions never wrote a story worth reading: only the imagination can do that.” And what an imagination! In those books alone, he summons a multiverse populated by armored bears, aeronauts, assassin priests and daemons, which are something like external human souls in the shape of animals—all developed in supple, elegant writing.

The quality of Mr. Pullman’s prose is no accident. From a 2011 speech we learn of his admiration for what he calls the classical “narrative tact” of Jane Austen, William Thackeray and Philippa Pearce, the author of “Tom’s Midnight Garden” (1958), all of whose work is made captivating, he says, by “clarity and steadiness and coolness of tone.” This type of storytelling has a technical term, free indirect style, which Mr. Pullman approvingly contrasts with the urgent first-person, present-tense style of narration (“I flinch, I sob”) that is so much in vogue these days in young-adult literature.

. . . .

“Fiction is the art of transformation [that] for many writers . . . allows for happy reconciliations they cannot achieve in real life,” Liz Rosenberg observes in a sparkling biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery, the Canadian writer who brought plain, sprightly, impulsive, red-headed Anne Shirley into the world with her 1908 novel, “Anne of Green Gables.” With the character of Anne, Ms. Rosenberg writes in “House of Dreams” , Montgomery “performed the great alchemy of art. She transformed her own history of abandonment into a story of rescue. Maud put herself into the fictional Anne: her own vivid imagination; a passionate love of nature; her habit of naming inanimate objects; the imaginary cupboard friend; her hungry affection for books; her own vanity, pride, stubbornness; and a deep, abiding attachment to those she loves.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal