Daemon Voices

by Philip Pullman, Simon Mason (Editor)

In over 30 essays, written over 20 years, one of the world’s great story-tellers meditates on story-telling. Warm, funny, generous, entertaining and, above all, deeply considered, they offer thoughts on a wide variety of topics, including the origin and composition of Philip’s own stories, the craft of writing and the story-tellers who have meant the most to Philip.

The art of story-telling is everywhere present in the essays themselves, in the instantly engaging tone, the vivid imagery and striking phrases, the resonant anecdotes, the humour and learnedness. Together, they are greater than the sum of their parts: a single, sustained engagement with story and story-telling.

Genres: Nonfiction, Writing, Essays, Books About Books, Audiobook, Literary Criticism, Literature

490 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 5, 2017

About the author

Sir Philip Nicholas Outram Pullman is an English writer. His books include the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials and The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, a fictionalised biography of Jesus. In 2008, The Times named Pullman one of the "50 greatest British writers since 1945". In a 2004 BBC poll, he was named the eleventh most influential person in British culture. He was knighted in the 2019 New Year Honours for services to literature.
Northern Lights, the first volume in His Dark Materials, won the 1995 Carnegie Medal of the Library Association as the year's outstanding English-language children's book. For the Carnegie's 70th anniversary, it was named in the top ten by a panel tasked with compiling a shortlist for a public vote for an all-time favourite. It won that public vote and was named all-time "Carnegie of Carnegies" in June 2007. It was filmed under the book's US title, The Golden Compass. In 2003, His Dark Materials trilogy ranked third in the BBC's The Big Read, a poll of 200 top novels voted by the British public.

Reviews

[Lisa of Troy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most expensive book that I own. It was imported from the UK to the US and is signed by Philip Pullman himself.

And it was so worth it!

The book itself is tactile heaven with a gorgeous, sumptuous cover and a red ribbon bookmark (which my cat likes to paw while I am reading). For the audiobook, the legend himself, Philip Pullman narrates. He is a truly incredible performer, and his enthusiasm shines. When I reached the end of the book, I was sad because I never wanted it to end.

For some reason, I have fallen into a trap. When I sit down at my computer to write my novel, when my story finally makes it on the page, it is going to be worthy of a Pulitzer prize on the first try. This book will magically flow onto the screen, creating a shockwave that will forever shape the history of literature. With these completely reasonable expectations, I freeze, unable to start.

Daemon Voices is a collection of 32 essays on storytelling by my favorite author, Philip Pullman.

The biggest takeaway is that Pullman gave me permission to fail. He talked about how he rewrote the first chapter to His Dark Materials many times.

Pullman shared the fact that he first thought that he wasn't allowed to write fantasy. What he doesn't come right out and say is that he spent many years-decades in fact-leading up to His Dark Materials.

Pullman's first published novel was The Haunted Storm in 1972. However, he didn't achieve worldwide critical acclaim until the first book in His Dark Materials, The Golden Compass/Northern Lights, which was published in 1995 when he was approximately 48 years old.

He spent 23 years practicing his storytelling, finetuning his craft.

Having read a lot of Pullman, I can attest that his storytelling skills have improved over the years. The Ruby in the Smoke (1985) was just okay while I loved Spring-Heeled Jack (1989), Clockwork/All Wound Up (1996), and I Was a Rat! (1999).

Pullman has such a commitment to quality-not only is his prose so incredibly smooth, there aren't any spelling mistakes or glaring grammar issues. In Dameon Voices, he wrote about the first and last sentences of His Dark Materials. He thinks about every single word. Every word is strategic.

Even though Pullman and I don't agree on every subject, he is incredibly intelligent and talented, and I have the deepest respect for him as a person and as an author.

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[Spencer Orey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of older short nonfiction pieces, many of which have useful ideas and tips for writers, often with reference to the Dark Materials books. I haven't read those books yet but it didn't take anything away from reading this. In general, Pullman has kind of a grumpy voice, but wow he can really write, and he often has a ton of useful things to say.

These kinds of books are usually really uneven, and this one is no exception. A good number of the pieces are introductions to other things Pullman has written, which mostly made me aware of how much he's done in his career. Likewise, there was some repetition of concepts across pieces ("Image schemas") but not in a bad way.

I got a lot out of it overall! I definitely think it'll make me a better writer. I'll pull this book out whenever I want to think more about writing images and how to use them effectively.

Also, this book made made want to read Paradise Lost and a bunch of William Blake poetry, which is something I've never wanted before. So that's cool.

[Sebastien Castell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daemon Voices, Phillip Pullman’s collection of essays on storytelling, philosophy, and society, appears at first glance to be a simple aggregation of a number of his previous talks and articles. It’s only when you reach the end, to his piece on The Republic of Heaven, that what he’s been building up to all along (perhaps over the entire course of his writing career), becomes clear: the role of stories in building a society rich in myth and wonder but without religion.

Not everyone will find the arguments persuasive. Pullman’s always been a bit of a foil for religious conservatives. He’s never shied away from that role, either, and is open about the fact that His Dark Materials explicitly inverts the consequences of Christian myth of Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge. But atheists might have their own hesitation about the way Pullman speaks of stories as almost transcendental, and matter itself having a kind of consciousness.

At its core, though, Daemon Voices feels like a profoundly humanist work, celebrating free will, individual agency, and especially art in all its forms (though Pullman can be forgiven if stories take an especially prominent role.)

Regardless of the philosophical explorations, however, what struck me most was the beauty of Pullman’s use of language and the passion with which he writes about works of art great and small, famous and barely known. Having recently experienced Ursula Le Guin’s collection of essays, No Time To Spare, I was similarly struck by how humbling it is to hear language used so expertly that, without drawing attention to itself, it blurs the line between prose and poetry. I guess what I’m really saying is that the articles in Daemon Voices are so incredibly well written that all I can do is be mesmerized (and incredibly jealous) of Pullman’s remarkable talent and mind.

As a last note, I highly recommend listening to Daemon Voices in audiobook. Pullman himself narrates his essays and his performance is absolutely captivating.

[Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of the pieces in here were originally given as speeches, which accounts both for the repetition of so much of the material, and also for a certain oratorical plainness of tone. Like any good speaker – like, perhaps, the ex-teacher that he is – Pullman tells you what he's going to say, says it, and then tells you what he's said.

This suits his arguments admirably, because one of the main things he wants to get across in his comments on writing is the un-literariness of his own style. He insists on this time and again, claiming to be ‘at the Jeffrey Archer end’ of the literary scale – a ‘storyteller’, not a ‘novelist’. He must know that no one listening to him would lump him in with Jeffrey Archer, which makes all this a little off-puttingly disingenuous. There's something defensive about it: he's happy to talk about the fun of writing about armoured bears or flying witches, but if you start to pin him down on characterisation or thematic structure, he can retreat at once by saying, ‘Oh, I don't know anything about all that; I'm just a humble tale-teller.’ I don't believe it for a moment.

So it's perhaps questionable, if no surprise, that Pullman's advice for writing boils down to the injunction, ‘Tell it plainly’:

The way to tell a story is to say what happened, and then shut up.

Not only are there many writers who have not followed this advice (to their benefit), I'm not even sure Pullman isn't one of them. But he draws the lesson from, primarily, his deep love of folklore and fairytale, which recurs in various ways throughout this book. The simple appeal, as he sees it, of such narratives has left him with a vague suspicion of books ‘with alternative openings and unclosed endings, or larded through and through with flashbacks and flash-forwards and flashbacks within flashbacks’. By contrast, ‘Of literary style in fairy tales there is not a smidgeon,’ he claims, ‘because these are not literary works, they're oral ones.’

I'm not even sure that's true (Basile's Tale of Tales, for one, is full of elaborate stylistic effects, and for ‘flashbacks within flashbacks’ you can hardly be more elaborate than the Thousand and One Nights) – but even if it were, it's not clear that this is definitely a good model for writing modern fiction. In fact I don't think he thinks it is either, he just seems to have argued himself into this position incidentally.

On language, his comments on the writer's responsibility to take care of their linguistic tools turns out, disappointingly, to boil down to a lot of the kind of prescriptivist silliness that never fails to set my teeth on edge: objecting to the way ‘passengers’ on a train are now called ‘customers’, or vaguely Boomerish bugbears like

the silly confusion between may and might. “Without the code-breaking work at Bletchley Park, Britain may well have lost the Second World War,” you hear people say, as if they're not sure whether we did or not. What they mean is, “Britain might well have lost the Second World War.” They should bloody well learn how to say it.

To note here is the fact that Pullman's deep respect for the way stories pass from generation to generation and evolve through the oral tradition is at odds with his complete rejection of the way language does the same thing.

And his veneration of fairytales seems to lead him somewhat astray in other ways, too. He's determined, for instance, to distinguish himself from other writers of ‘fantasy’, a genre for which he clearly feels some disdain. When pushed, he admits that he writes it, though it ‘embarrasses’ him. He is very dismissive of Tolkien (‘that kind of thing is not hard to make up, actually’) and his armies of imitators because, he says, their characters are

psychologically shallow […] there isn't a character in the whole of The Lord of the Rings who has a tenth of the complexity, the interest, the sheer fascination, of even a fairly minor character from Middlemarch, like Mary Garth. Nothing in her is arbitrary: everything is necessary and organic, by which I mean that she really does seem to have grown into life, and not to have been assembled from a kit of parts.

Again, the problem here is that he's spent the whole book arguing exactly the reverse with respect to fairytales.

There is no psychology in a fairy tale. The characters have little interior life; their motives are clear and obvious. […] The tremors and mysteries of human awareness, the whispers of memory, the promptings of half-understood regret or doubt or desire that are so much part of the subject matter of the modern novel are absent entirely. One might almost say that the characters in a fairy tale are not actually conscious.

In fairytales, this is a good thing; in ‘fantasy’, it's a bad thing. His own conclusion is that fantasy is ‘a great vehicle when it serves the purposes of realism, and a lot of old cobblers when it doesn't’, but if you swap the word ‘realism’ for the name ‘Philip Pullman’ you might be closer to what's actually going on here.

I hope all of this doesn't seem like an unduly cynical or mean-spirited response to his arguments, because I did rather enjoy this book; I wouldn't have spent all this time writing these objections out if I hadn't found it interesting and engaging in the first place. And there are plenty of subjects here where I found him totally convincing: he's great on Blake, wise and humane on religion, and surprisingly insightful on the subject of cinema. He quotes David Mamet's famous pronouncement on the primary question for a director – ‘Where do I put the camera?’ – and says that it is, for him, ‘the basic storytelling question’. This is a very productive way to approach many practical matters of writing, and it gives Pullman a very smart way of examining, for instance, the increasing use of first-person present-tense narration.

Overall, he comes across as a sensible and generous and intellectually curious person, and listening in on these talks is a very pleasurable way to spend some time in his company. But the collection did leave me with the niggling impression that Pullman's conception of what makes him a good and interesting writer is not quite the same as my own.

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Description: Essays on Storytelling. In over 30 essays, written over 20 years, one of the world's great story-tellers meditates on story-telling. Warm, funny, generous, entertaining, and above all, deeply considered, they offer thoughts on a wide variety of topic, including the origin and composition of Philip's own stories, the craft of writing and the story-tellers who have meant the most to him. The art of story-telling is everywhere present in the essays themselves, in the instantly engaging tone, the vivid imagery and the striking phrases, the resonant anecdotes, the humour and learnedness. Together, they are greater than the sum of their parts

How his days at Oxford in the sixties provided the inspiration for the setting of His Dark Materials.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09c1y3m

[Mona · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m very ambivalent about this book.

I rarely read essay collections since I prefer fiction.

I certainly much prefer Phillip Pullman,
the consummate story teller, to Phillip Pullman,
the cranky and opinionated essayist.

Still, there were some gems in this collection,
as well as some stinkers.

This anthology was, at times, a fascinating
glimpse into the mind of a well loved author.

Technically, not all of the pieces in this collection
are essays. Many were originally lectures given
at places like the Blake Society and Oxford
University.

One of the good things about Pullman is that
he’s very honest. He says what he really thinks
not what he thinks we want to hear. He often
seems not to care what his audience thinks of
him. This is refreshing in an age of spin and
branding. But it’s also grating and annoying at
times. Even infuriating.

Pullman is enchanting and informative when he’s discoursing on the lush poetry of Milton’s Paradise Lost or the writings of William Blake or American poet James Merrill.

He’s delightful when enthusing about his favorite
reads (although he’s admittedly got some strange taste in books that not everyone will agree with).

His interest in folk lore and Grimm fairy tales is
contagious. (He edited an English version of the Grimm stories).

I enjoyed hearing him discuss the craftsmanship of
writing and the need to consider every sentence.
His careful writing is a contrast to the sloppiness we often see in published books today.

I enjoyed him discussing grammar, changing usage,
and the use of tenses (he uses Vanity Fair as
an example of the wide ranging use of tenses other
than the currently fashionable present tense).

It was fun to hear him talk about writing The
Scarecrow and His Servant.

He had me when he spoke of the importance of joy.

I was fascinated by his discussion of what, borrowing a scientific term, he calls the “phase space” of a story, meaning all possible permutations of that story.

I mostly agreed with his ideas about the author’s “tact”: meaning the author should keep himself out of the story and allow the reader to focus on the story, not the author.

He made sense when he
exhorted writers to move the story along and not get bogged down in descriptive prose, which loses their readers’ attention.

Pullman interested me when he confessed that he wasn’t always consciously aware of the message or intention of his work. He believes in a “democracy of reading”, meaning that he is no more an authority on his own work than his readers are. He emphasizes that each reader will see something different there.

I also found it interesting when he professed that he couldn’t really answer the popular question “Where do you get your ideas?” because often he didn’t know where his ideas came from.

I even nodded along in agreement when he discussed some of his pet peeves: the loss
of joy and time in modern life, the silliness of
categorizing children’s literature by age group
(as maybe even adults will read it), the ruining
of education by forcing teachers to spend
hours on administrative tasks, the imposition
of what he calls “monoculture” by, for example,
calling railway passengers “customers”.

But I enjoyed him much less when he went on and
on about the things he loathes.

He despises J.R.R. Tolkien and his
many imitators, whom he sneeringly calls
“The Little Tolkiens”. He also doesn’t much
care for the Narnia books. He has this fixed
idea that all fantasy must be rooted in reality
and that realism is superior to fantasy.

He doesn’t care for religion or theocracy, or
words like “God” or “spiritual”.

While I agree with him about the abuses of
theocracies and of organized religion, and I also agree that words like “spiritual” have been abused and misused, I found him to be as doctrinaire, strident, and inflexible as the theocracies and religious institutions he criticizes.

Part of the problem was the selection of essays.
While they were helpfully grouped by topic,
they became repetitive, since several selections
would reiterate the same ideas.

In any case, while I found some of the essays
fascinating, by the end of the book I was
weary of Pullman’s opinionated abrasiveness
when he discusses certain topics.

Still, I’ll read any fiction he writes. But I
think I’ll pass on any more of his essays.

[Veronique · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it” - Samuel Johnson

Having loved His Dark Materials, I did wonder what Pullman would ‘say’ in these essays and speeches. Well, I was expecting frank and direct views - no beating around the bush for him - and that is exactly what I got. The author concentrates on storytelling however rather than novel writing, the distinction telling and interesting.

The other thing that surprised me to a certain extent is how accessible these texts are. Pullman’s conversational tone works so well, and invites you to his discussion, using examples from his own writing as well as from other sources, whether in his defence of children’s literature or his experience of reading Paradise Lost. You may not agree with every single one of his opinions, but they are all engaging.

[Darcy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Philip Pullman’s Dæmon Voices – Essays on Storytelling is pleasurable reading for English teachers, students, writers and anyone who loves stories. Best known for the trilogy, His Dark Materials, Pullman has a deep, highly practical understanding of what it takes to craft a story to delight both novice and experienced teachers of writing. His obvious affection for other storytellers, the ones who have meant the most to him, further illuminates Pullman’s philosophy of writing successfully, and with integrity, for young people.

Where does a story come from? Pullman never constructs a story around a theme but starts “with pictures, images, scenes, moods – like bits of dreams, or fragments of half-forgotten films. That’s how they all begin.” He relates how “the business of the storyteller…is with the path and not the wood”. Pullman explains that there are many stories in these woods but he has to create a path the reader can follow from an infinity of choices. He keenly feels his responsibility “to language, to his audience, to truth, and to his story itself” for constructing these paths.

These essays, often delivered as keynote addresses to audiences of authors, educators and librarians, are particularly interesting to those who read adolescent fiction. Most have updates at their conclusion with new information, interesting asides or with the internet and e-books in mind. Pullman tends to talk about “storytelling” rather more than “writing” and has strong opinions on what works for him as both a reader and writer. Key questions asked include: who is telling the story? whose words do we read? whose voice do we hear? He is very clear that the “storyteller should be invisible…and the best way to make sure of that is to make the story itself so interesting that the teller just… disappears”. Pullman often quotes or paraphrases filmmakers, especially David Mamet and Alfred Hitchcock, to illustrate his points about storytelling:

“The best thing to do is tell a story as though you’re seeing it… Just tell it normally. Most of the time, my camera stays on eye level now. Once in a while, I’ll move the camera as if a man were walking and seeing something. And it pulls back or it moves in for emphasis when you don’t want to make a cut. But outside of that, I just use the simplest camera in the world.”

Pullman has “a personal rule” to never start a story with a pronoun. “‘She stood at the window, gazing down at the …’ If I read a story like that, I’m irritated before I begin. Who stood at the window? What’s her name? How am I supposed to know who she is?’” He believes that reading a novel written entirely in the first person and the present tense feels “like being in a room where they have those Venetian blinds that go up instead of across – you can only see out in vertical strips, and everything else is closed off to you”. Pullman especially appreciates the subtle storytelling skills of Hitchcock. If a story begins with “a burglar ransacking drawers then when the lights of the owner’s car show up outside the window, we think: hurry up! They’re coming! We don’t want them to catch him. We’re on his side, because we started with him.” This is evident in much of Hitchcock and one scene (from my memory) when Norman Bates is dispatching the murdered Marion Crane’s car into the swamp and it stops sinking, the viewer, like Norman, anxiously waits, hoping desperately that the car and body will be submerged. We are, for a moment, complicit with ‘the psycho’ due to the artistry of the storyteller.

Pullman’s insight into teaching poetry is particularly interesting. His analysis of Milton’s Paradise Lost is excellent; hardly surprising considering the importance of the text to his own work. Pullman says, and I am certain educators will understand the profound importance of his commentary, much about this form in classrooms:

“I have come across teachers and student teachers whose job was to teach poetry, but who thought that poetry was only a fancy way of dressing up simple statements to make them look complicated, and that their task was to help their pupils translate the stuff into ordinary English. When they’d translated it, when they’d ‘understood’ it, the job was done. It had the effect of turning the classroom into a torture chamber, in which everything that made the poem a living thing had been killed and butchered. No one had told such people that poetry is in fact enchantment; that it has the form it does because that very form casts a spell; and that when they thought they were bothered and bewildered, they were in fact being bewitched, and if they let themselves accept the enchantment and enjoy it, they would eventually understand much more about the poem.”

Most teachers would likely admit, at least sometimes, to guilty as charged.

On a more positive note for us English teachers, who can argue with Pullman’s observation that the experience of reading poetry aloud, when you don’t fully understand it, is a curious and complicated one:

“It’s like suddenly discovering that you can play the organ. Rolling swells and peals of sound, powerful rhythms and rich harmonies are at your command; and as you utter them you begin to realise that the sound you’re releasing from the words as you speak is part of the reason they’re there. The sound is part of the meaning, and that part only comes alive when you speak it. So at this stage it doesn’t matter that you don’t fully understand everything: you’re already far closer to the poem than someone who sits there in silence looking up meanings and references and making assiduous notes.”

The author’s passion for ST Coleridge, William Blake and John Milton clearly evident in these essays, as well as his novels.

Fairy tales are particularly thrilling for Pullman. His admiration for the achievement of Katherine M Briggs, who spent a lifetime collecting British fairy tales, is evident. He has good insight into this genre, that is very useful for students, pointing out that:

“William Wordsworth’s The Prelude, or James Joyce’s Ulysses, or any other literary work, exists as a text first of all. The words on the page are what it is…But a fairy tale is not a text of that sort. It’s a transcription made on one or more occasions of the words spoken by one of many people who have told this tale.”

He regrets that he did not know terribly much about Grimm’s tales when he was a teacher, tending to retell the Homeric epics rather than fairy tales. One imagines The Iliad, retold by Pullman, must have been a treat for some students who probably did not realise their good fortune.

Pullman never shies away from social commentary, especially about religion, dogma and education. He is often generous to his opponents, living and dead, even occasionally finding a good word to say about CS Lewis. Pullman does include some sharp right-jabs though, aimed at the current managerial vogue in schools, throughout these essays:

“…the obsession with targets and testing and league tables, the management-driven and politics-corrupted and jargon-clotted rubbish that so deforms the true work of schools.”

“The view of Grammar depicted here is not the one currently held by the British Department for Education, which is that grammar is a set of facts about which children must be drilled and tested so that their school can be ranked in order in a league table.”

The book is arranged thoughtfully for teachers. The contents page lists a “topic finder” for recurring themes and groups together the essays in which they are discussed. This includes: on writing; on writers; on pictures; on other writers’ stories; science and culture; religion and story and much more besides.

Dæmon Voices – Essays on Storytelling is a “must-read” that will provide professional sustenance and great personal reading pleasure. Highly recommended.

[Carmilla Voiez · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book about writing. The hardback version has colour plates at the centre and is exquisitely bound. It contains lectures and articles by Pullman about books and writing. There’s considerable repetition because these talks and essays were intended for different audiences, but rather than becoming boring, the repeated points help to reinforce important and recurring themes. Taken as a whole it is a feel good read for aspiring and accomplished authors. It talks of the importance of literature in people’s lives and the challenges many authors face, then dips into work by giants like Milton, Blake, George Elliot and Lewis Carroll to illustrate salient points. It discusses philosophy, religion, science, paintings, poetry and prose with an intelligent honesty that draws the reader in.

The book concludes with the hopeful chapter “The Republic of Heaven” and a plea to all those of a humanist persuasion to keep pushing towards a secular paradise on Earth with acts of kindness, by finding our own connection with the world we are all a part of, and by creating and sharing our own myths and stories to bring truths and facts into alignment.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

From BBC Radio 4 Extra:
In these personal, entertaining and deeply thoughtful essays, Philip Pullman examines the art of storytelling.

Written over a period of 30 years, they reflect on a wide range of topics including the origins of his own stories, the practice of writing and the storytellers who have most inspired him.

Today's essay reveals how his days at Oxford in the sixties provided the inspiration for the setting of His Dark Materials.

Adapted and produced by Kate McAll
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09c1y3m

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

We all know Philip Pullman can write. But come on. This compendium of essays by him is heavy sledding. Not his fault - I think the editors decided, "let's put every essay Pullman ever wrote in one book, no matter if they're repetitive." I expected to find his complete shopping lists in the next chapter, or his phone pad doodles. This is not for reading in bed: doze off and you might end up with a bloody nose as the book slips from your hands. All that said, reading these essays introduced me to some wonderful overlooked mid-century writers and illustrators like Fritz Wegman and Leon Garfield.

[Ali-pie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is quite readable and has some interesting ideas and insights. However Pullman contradicts himself a lot and has strong opinions on subjects that aren't his area of expertise. He should probably be more aware of his white privilege in places too. Pullman says himself that his talent seems to lie in fantasy (though he's snooty about genre fiction) and I agree that he should probably stick to that. His Dark Materials is a masterpiece. I'm a bit of a completist so I was interested to read this (also the cover is pretty!) but I don't think anyone who skips it is missing much. Certainly don't take it all too seriously or read it uncritically.

[Vincent · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars
I have some complicated thoughts on this collection of essays. Most of them are quite interesting, and none of them bored me. However, I do think I prefer Philip Pullman's fiction work to his non-fiction thoughts, such as these. There were some parts that annoyed me for a while, and then later he wrote something that made me think I was wrong to be annoyed, because he had meant something entirely different. I think it is often about framing. Sadly, I cannot now find examples of the sort of thing that bugged me originally; I think it had something to do with an earthly, non-magical sort of thinking, but then in several later essays Pullman is describing how he does not understand words such as "spiritual" or "soul" or "God"; early on he mentions he is a materialist, and later he says he likes to think of matter as conscious in a sense, and taking joy in other matter. I suppose he himself already says that he likes to believe contradictory things, so I shouldn't be surprised.

I suppose he reminded me a little bit, here, of Douglas R. Hofstadter, in that he can come across as rather self-indulgent and overly secure in his thoughts and ideas. Possibly I'm being a bit too hard on him; he's certainly nowhere near as garrulous as that other author, but I did get a slightly similar vibe.

Anyway. There's still a lot to like about this work, and I did indeed enjoy it; I love his (totally secular) description of the Republic of Heaven, the analyses of various works of literature that he caused me to read (I decided to skip The Anatomy of Melancholy for the time being, but damn if he did not at least make me consider picking it up), and various other topics that came up in the course of the collection.

One thing it is not as good for as I might have hoped when I first picked it up is getting inspiration on how to write, or how to write well. But that's alright; there are other books for that, or better yet, a person can just practice that on their own.

[Miss Bookiverse · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book proposes, the reader questions; the book responds, the reader considers. (p. 416)

I love reading non-fiction about the craft of storytelling and the relationship between author and reader, especially from such a talented, intelligent individual as Philip Pullman. I don't agree with all of his views (especially on the merit of fantasy books) and some of his musings went over my head, but I enjoyed the majority of these extremely well written speeches, introductions, and essays and the little insights they gave into His Dark Materials and some of his other works.

So when I needed a way of getting from one universe to another, I didn't waste time inventing anything fancy: I just cut a hole. (p. 92)

[Eleanor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been reading these essays a few at a time in between other books. It is such a pleasure to spend time in Philip Pullman's company. There is understandably some overlap among some of the essays/lectures, as he spoke to various audiences about storytelling, myths, atheism, Gnosticism, children's literature, and so on.

He is a voice of quiet sanity in an increasingly insane world.

A solid 4.5 stars.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love reading what authors have to say about the process of writing. I’ve only read Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, but it’s such an impressive series that I figured he would have so excellent things to say about writing. And I wasn’t disappointed. This collection of essays covers far more than just writing and literature; Pullman also discusses art, religion, science, and how all of them tie into storytelling. His intelligence comes through strongly, and he remains articulate and, most importantly, interesting no matter the subject. I didn’t always agree with him, but I enjoyed reading his opinions.

As with any collection, whether it’s essays, short stories, or poems, I liked some better than others. None of them were bad; I just wasn’t interested in the all of the subjects. This was the case for several of the critical essays, particularly Pullman’s introduction to Milton’s Paradise Lost. I still read them, but it was more skimming. His essays on the writing process were, of course, the ones that engaged me the most. My favorite was “The Path Through the Wood,” which discussed world building and his process of creating the mulefa in His Dark Materials. He uses the metaphor of a path in the woods. The wood is the world the story takes place in, and the path is the story. He makes great points about why it’s important to stay on the path and not get lost in the woods while writing. I also enjoyed his discussions of various fairy tales and his introduction to Oliver Twist.

Simon Mason edited the collection, and he has done a wonderful job. He includes a brief introduction explain his process and some of his choices. The majority of the essays come from speeches Pullman gave, and the introduction gives insight into how they were edited to remove redundant information. There are still several things that are repeated in multiple essays, but I think it helps highlight what Pullman finds most important. There is also a topic finder that breaks the contents down by theme, which I found quite handy. If someone just wants to read the essays discussing His Dark Materials, they can easily locate them thanks to the topic finder.

Overall, Daemon Voices is a lovely collection of essays on stories, writing, and literature. Some may be more interesting to certain readers than others, but they are each a fascinating look into the mind of one of the century’s best children’s authors.

[Mathew · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is difficult to try and get into the mind of a writer and wonder how the pieces of the jigsaw, which will later become a story, a play or an essay all fit together but what we have here is one author’s contemplation on what it is to write, why write what does he and where his fascination with what he writes all stems from. It is a highly accomplished autobiographical map of his literary mind and it tells us much of Pullman’s beliefs with regards to religion and story but of which are, in his mind, wholly related.

In these essays, Pullman pulls no punches when it comes to his dissemination of faith and God and I would suppose many readers will find this uncomfortable reading but his understanding of story, its history and the process of ‘making’ a story are most welcome. I have always enjoyed his skill as a wordsmith and this collection of essays, speeches and articles offer a broad coverage in what it means to be a writer often within the context of his Dark Materials books but not always. In particular, I took much from his essay ‘The Path through the Wood’ on how stories work, Children’s Literature without Borders and Let’s Write it in Red, the latter of which explores the practice of writing and was, to my knowledge, originally published in Nancy Chambers’ Signal.

What you have here then is a collection of Pullman’s ideologies with regards to the very things I mention at the end of my first paragraph. They are not for reading in one entire sweep but for savouring – something to pick up and keep coming back to when you’re reading – like a fine Tokay.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars for meh.

Some good bits, but a lot of meh also. This is a collection of introductions and talks and miscellaneous pieces, which gets a bit repetitive, and many of which are not worth the time. Really very little on storytelling despite the subtitle. Most of the best bits were toward the beginning. See my updates for comments on individual pieces.

A reminder of why I generally dislike collections. (Not as much as anthologies, I despise anthologies, but still.) Either you read a bunch of boring crap you don't like, or they sit there staring at you, reminding you of your failure to complete them.

[Big Al · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really delightful compilation. Sometimes Pullman gets a bit cranky (e.g. throwing shade at the entire genre of fantasy EXCEPT for his own works within the genre...) and long-winded, but for the most part he is a charming companion. Pullman has a simple style, but he shares some valuable ideas in this collection about storytelling, education, and the nature of consciousness itself (!). I quite enjoyed reading his thoughts on subjects he is passionate about, like Milton, Blake, children's literature, and randomly enough, a painting of a woman at a bar.

[Kathleen Flynn]

So good!

I heartily recommend this to all fans of His Dark Materials, particularly anyone with an interest in writing themselves. There is a lot here about Pullman's approach to writing, views on other writers, and thoughts about the world more generally. It's compiled from various talks he gave and articles he wrote, which made me a little worried it might be shapeless or repetitive. But though some ideas and images recur, it's more helpful than annoying, in my view.

I refer you to my 46 highlights if you'd like a fast look at why I loved this so. But don't stop there, get the book.

[Kieran Fanning · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally finished this well written and beautifully made compendium of essays on storytelling. I found some of them a little dull and irrelevant, but there are also some gems in here. Will appeal to anyone with an interest in children's literature. 4 stars.

[Charlotte Burt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much more scholarly than I was expecting with frequent references to William Blake and Milton. I learned a lot

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There is the wood and there is the path. The making-up part is different from the writing-down part."

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you’re thinking about buying this book to learn about writing from a respected author you might be disappointed; there are better books out there for that purpose. This is not a ‘How To’ guide, more a collection of musings on stories with the occasional (fleeting) reference to how he developed some aspects of his trilogy, His Dark Materials.

Yes, it’s cerebral and eloquent - you’d hardly expect less from Phillip Pullman - but it is also very repetitive because he obviously used material again and again for his talks. He loves to talk about theoretical physics and I found the second, third and fourth explanation of ‘phase space’ tiresome. Someone involved in the publication of this book should have said, “Hang on, should we really expect people to pay £10.99 and then have to skip four or five pages every time he repeats his ‘wood / path’ analogy? Maybe we should edit that out...”’

Some parts had a snooty tone I didn’t enjoy: his views on education, the suggestion that writers only use first person perspective because third person is too hard for them, his derisive mentions of genre fiction and “trash fiction”, etc.

But there are some good bits. If you like His Dark Materials you might be interested in the parts where he talks about how his ideas unfolded, but those moments are few and far between. There are some funny parts and there are parts where he is very complimentary of other writers.

[Jackie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first 150 pages of this book were outright inspiring. I love Pullman's breakdowns of world building, his argument for children's literature as a source for morality, and his takedown of innocence as an ideal state. I was most fascinated just to learn his approach to writing: starting with moments and images, then spinning them out until everything fit into place.

I would have rated it more highly but for two things:
-I don't think the format of the book best serves his purpose. To me, the fact that it was a collection of speeches rather than a new work designed for his topic felt lazy and repetitive. Since the speeches were for different audiences, and often began with Pullman complaining about the topic he was assigned to talk about that day, I felt like he was wasting my time. I would have much preferred if he resourced his speeches and the themes he has developed to write a cohesive and compelling book on writing, meant for a book audience.
-He has an irrational vendetta against Tolkien. I just flatly contest the opinion that Tolkien's characters are one-dimensional and lack nuance.

Overall great book, and if you want to get the best out of it, feel free to pick and choose the essays that look most interesting.

[Henry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the kind of book that I think is better appreciated if you read one or two essays at a time over a long period. Unfortunately, I really just wanted to be done with it, and so I read the whole thing straight through, which made it kind of a slog by the end. I love the "His Dark Materials" trilogy and I think Pullman is a great writer, so this was never an unpleasant read, but I also didn't feel like I needed it as a permanent part of my book collection. If you're more of a Pullman completist than I am, you'll probably feel different.

The most interesting takeaway from these essays, for me, was the focus on how a central theme in the "His Dark Materials" trilogy is that the loss of innocence is something to be celebrated, rather than mourned. I guess that's kind of a "duh" moment if you read the books as an adult, but I read them in fourth grade and certainly didn't pick up on any complex themes whatsoever (in fact, I remember barely understanding the plot of the third book at all... maybe I should read it again).

[Thomas Edmund · Rating 5 out of 5]

I confess I didn't know too much about Pullman when I picked up this book. I'd read the Dark Materials trilogy but that was about the limit of it. And boy am I glad to have grabbed Daemon Voices. Pullman has an exquisite way of talking about writing, insights that you wouldn't get reading entire 300 page 'on writing' piece. I especially like his reviews of the Fantasy genre, and how he approached it.

More generally I'm not sure about the utility of this book, there are quite a few essays on religion which are of interest but I'm not sure if they are a major selling point. Basically I think the collection is a must for writers and perhaps hardcore fans of Pullman but I wouldn't necessarily recommend to someone just looking for something to flick through as there is a tonne of material in this book.

[itchy · Rating 4 out of 5]

titular sentence:
p261: In fact, there are probably dæmon voices whispering to us all the time, and we’ve forgotten how to hear them.

wait, what?:
p192: And in order to understand this cartoon, which we all effortlessly do, we instantaneously call on our memories not only of what we’ve seen happen when you tip over a container of liquid, but of such things as carol singing—we know why there is a group of people standing in the snow, and what they’re doing, and we contrast the innocent purity of their intentions with the wicked mischief being planned by Morticia, Gomez and the rest of the Addams family on the roof; and we understand graphic imagery too—we interpret the wispy trail of white leading from the container as meaning that this isn’t just cold water, it’s hot.

I may have a couple more but they got corrupted.

Very profound.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh Philip Pullman, you might be my favorite philosopher.

While some exact sentences and ideas repeat themselves a few times throughout this collection of essays about writing, reading, education, and morality each essay really is its own perfectly written piece. They are almost like sermons the way they are constructed, but obviously humanist sermons, not religious ones.

[Ana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book, although I don't agree with everything Pullman writes (specifically his dislike of the Lord of the Rings!), I am in love with the overarching theme of his essays, which is a great appreciation of the material world, and how stories illuminate the fundamental truths of human nature, consciousness, and our relation to the world.