Philip Pullman, Master Storyteller: A Guide to the Worlds of His Dark Materials

by Claire Squires

Philip Pullman is one of the most commercially and critically successful British authors of the past decade. With a writing career extending back to the early 1970s, Pullman's great achievement has been in the publication of the His Dark Materials trilogy: Northern Lights; (1995; US title The Golden Compass), The Subtle Knife; (1997) and The Amber Spyglass(2000). With these novels, which have appealed equally to children and to adults, Pullman has carved a space for himself as a writer of moral seriousness, imaginative depth and storytelling virtuosity.
Claire Squires' book is the first comprehensive and authoritative study of this great writer. The focus is on Pullman's central achievement with His Dark Materials, but it also considers his entire oeuvre. Importantly, the book informs readers about the contexts, sources and influences behind the trilogy, and examines the controversies and debates that have surrounded the trilogy and its creator, since its publication.

Genres: Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published October 20, 2006

About the author

Professor Claire Squires is Director of the Stirling Centre for International Publishing and Communications at the University of Stirling, Scotland, and director of the Scottish Graduate School for the Arts and Humanities. Her publications include Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain (2007) and as co-editor, the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume 7, The Twentieth Century and Beyond (2019). With Beth Driscoll, she is co-founder of the conceptual school Ullapoolism, with their jointly authored publications, including Publishing Bestsellers: Buzz and the Frankfurt Book Fair (2020) and articles on book festivals, sexual harassment in publishing, and the smell of books.

Reviews

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first piece of academic evaluation of Pullman that I've read, so I'm not comparing it to any other. But I found it satisfactory for as much as it covers. (And I was an English major, so I've read other academic evaluations.)

Minor warning: Somehow every single occurrence of the word "see" in the text has been made capitalized and italic, See. I don't believe it means anything--other than that a copy-editor ran a global search-&-replace by mistake.