When journalists used to visit Philip Pullman, they were invited to a shed in his back garden in suburban Oxford. For years he had written in this shack-out-the-back to escape the sound of his son's violin-playing. "His playing was fine," says Pullman, "but I need to hear the rhythm of my next sentence in my head before I write it. I can stand traffic, screaming kids, but not the competition of music." The remark confirms Pullman's appealing niceness (not for a moment would he suggest his son's fiddling was anything but enchanting) as well as his writerly fastidiousness.
Pullman, 58, no longer owns the shed where he wrote the famous trilogy His Dark Materials between 1993 and 2000, nor the modest Oxford house where he and his wife of 34 years, Jude, raised their two sons. His fortunes have altered dramatically. His trilogy, whose popularity proves there are many children out there who like to be intellectually challenged in their reading, has sold 7m copies in 38 languages. There has also been a sellout stage adaptation directed by Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre (due for a second run from later this month), and a three-part movie series is being written by Sir Tom Stoppard, to be produced by the film company that made the adaptations of The Lord of the Rings. All of which amounts to what publishers call "a second and a third bite of the cherry". Pullman is one of the most successful authors of the new century. And his fame and fortune are certain to go on rocketing. The question is not just how sudden wealth has altered his character and lifestyle, but how it has affected his powerful imagination and the rhythm of his writing.
Pullman, who is about to publish a new children's book and is planning a top-secret stand-alone novel about his Dark Materials heroine, Lyra, has recently relocated. He has bought a detached, modernised 16th-century farmhouse in the rolling countryside of well-heeled Cumnor, just 10 minutes by car from Oxford station. A new Mercedes E320 estate stands on the secluded brick-paved driveway.
He greets me at the door. Tall, bespectacled, fleshy, although in reasonably good shape, he has the self-effacing air of an old-fashioned university don. As he speaks, there is an impression of the musical clarity of a practised storyteller; a barely perceptible Welsh lilt. Every so often, though, his jaw hardens and the large pale-blue eyes are no longer smiling, indicating a potential for fiery antagonism. His shirt and trousers are workman blue, but his cardinal red socks signal a flash of subversive panache. He takes me to the kitchen - expanses of terracotta tiles, downlighting, new designer units, and a resplendent cream four-oven Aga. "We've been bending this house to our will," he tells me.
While he makes a cafetiere of very black coffee, he establishes his authorial credentials. Pullman has been publishing children's stories since he was 25, but it took him three decades to be noticed and to make money. All that time, struggling on modest salaries in schools and latterly at a teacher-training college, he was paying tithes in abundance to his craft. Yet he does not give the least impression of injured merit. He believes, in fact, that his current burst of success is due in large measure to luck, not least his publisher's decision to release the His Dark Materials trilogy as children's books rather than adult fantasy. "Had I been classed an adult-fantasy writer," he says, "the books would never have flown off the shelves. Nothing succeeds like a book recommended by your children."
Has success disrupted his writing? Amid the pressure-cooker publicity of the past two years ("It is so difficult," he says, "to cut oneself off nowadays from endless distractions and travel"), Pullman has completed The Scarecrow and His Servant, a 200-page adventure for children, published next month. It is not so much to keep the cash flowing as to satisfy his addiction to writing stories. It will delight his fans for its breathless pace and inventiveness, as well as the humour and decent humanity of the central characters (albeit one is an assembly of straw and wood, with a turnip for a head and a pea for a brain). It is tight, and not remotely on the scale or complexity of His Dark Materials; it also has illustrations by Peter Bailey, reminiscent of Ardizzone's drawings. But the new work, which features a wise servant and a foolish if well-meaning master (the scarecrow), is sustained by a hilarious jumble of literary allusions: Frankenstein meets Don Quixote meets Mr Micawber meets Jeeves meets Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes meets The Name of the Rose meets Treasure Island. My six-year-old granddaughter couldn't get enough of it; nor could I. As for reading levels, on our third session she snatched the book from me and started to read fluently by herself.
Amid a catalogue of themes in the book is the notion of continuity of personality, despite the constant replacement of the parts. The scarecrow's body is constantly being lost and replaced, attacked by termites, lopped and recycled. "I'm fascinated," says Pullman, "by the idea of permanence and change, like old ships that get re-clad till there's nothing left of the original, and yet stay the same ship." His conversation never strays far from such metaphysical questions.
On the kitchen table, which, he says, he made with his own hands, lie dog-eared copies of the New Scientist and the Scientific American. Pullman is an aficionado of the weird realms of physics, from which his imagination has derived the notion that our existence is played out in parallel universes. In these "other worlds", circumstances can be familiar but dramatically different. The scientific reference marks the contrast between his peculiar vision of the possible, however remote, and "mere" magic and witchcraft - of J K Rowling, for example - which demands total suspension of disbelief.
In Northern Lights, the first of the His Dark Materials trilogy, Pullman conceives of an alternative but contemporary Oxford in which travel technology has not got beyond steam and the airship, and where human beings are accompanied by individual soul-mate familiars in the form of protean animals known as daemons: monkeys, birds, snow leopards, reptiles, moths. It is also a world in which the fall of man, as told in the Bible, represents human emancipation rather than a moral catastrophe and hereditary guilt. Pullman's preoccupation in the trilogy is nothing less than "man's first disobedience and the fruit". In his reprise of Paradise Lost, original sin is a lie, and God is an ancient fallen angel who has perpetrated a creationist con on the human race, wickedly exploited by a viciously inquisitional church. As the trilogy develops, the central teenage character, Lyra, emerges as a second Eve. In a quest that takes in the literal death of "God", who is no more than a wizened, foetus-like invalid, Lyra releases human beings from attachment to the afterlife. Meanwhile, Will, the novel's hero, who becomes Lyra's companion, enables her to pursue her quest to its ultimate bittersweet consummation with the aid of a "subtle knife" (based on the laws of quantum physics), which allows him to cut windows into parallel worlds. The finale is the toppling of the kingdom of heaven and the establishment of a celestial atheistic republic on Earth. Small wonder the Christian right in America are out for his blood.
Pullman's imagination is foundry-like in its sparky energy. He is fascinated by the drama of ideas. He sees a link between the way a writer can hold a repertoire of words, images, metaphors, in suspension before final commitment on the page, and the mysteries of quantum physics, in which phenomena appear to exist in a state of unrealised potency until the researcher brings them into actuality by a specific measurement. He refers frequently to the famous "Schršdinger's cat" conundrum, and what physicists call the "collapse of the wave function", in which a cat in a sealed box can be understood to be both alive and dead under certain abstruse quantum physical conditions.
The strange ambience of science-based paradoxes seems to spill into his everyday life. As he walks through the house, two sibling pugs are glued to his heels. The one called Hogarth is charcoal-black, a contemplative podge that looks out upon the world with stupefied wonder. The other, Nellie, is stone-coloured, abrasive and jittery. Could these be Pullman's twin but contradictory daemons? The pugs, one gentle-eyed and adoring, the other pop-eyed with indignation, are reminiscent of the diametrically opposed judgments that have dogged Pullman's work, outlandishly exemplified by the Hitchens siblings. Christopher Hitchens, the left-leaning Washington journalist, has hailed Pullman a literary genius and a salutary influence on the young; whereas his right-wing brother, Peter, has denounced him as the "most dangerous man in England" for his denial of God and Christianity. The contradictions continue to rage. While the archbishop Rowan Williams has advocated the teaching of Pullman in schools for the profound ethical questions he raises, The Catholic Herald would have him and his works burnt at the stake for corrupting youth.
Pullman leads me through a door marked "The Way to the Southseas" and into his work room, an extension at the back of the house. The space is a luxurious alternative to the old garden shed. Bright, cool, book-lined, it has a raised desk-cum-workbench at one end: he writes with a pen and copies onto a PC. Jostling spines with collections of children's books are the works of fashionable scientific theorists: Daniel Dennett on Darwin, Steven Pinker on consciousness, Steven Weinberg on theories of everything, Stephen Hawking on black holes, Richard Dawkins on evolution, David Deutsch on styles of explanation. In the middle of the room stands a carpenter's vice and various tools. He loves handling, carving, chipping at wood; between writing and plundering the mysteries of science he is sculpting the head for a rocking horse he is making for his granddaughters.
The swap of Pullman's tool shed for a shedload of money is an unavoidable topic. Pullman, it seems to me, is not entirely comfortable with his new-found wealth; or, more accurately, with temptations to extravagance. As I admired his car, he said a trifle hastily: "Yes. But it's diesel: 50 miles to the gallon on the long trip." As for the Aga: "Mmm... but I can't help worrying whether it contributes to global warming." He ducks his head uneasily with the irony of it all. Then he issues a disclaimer, for which he is indebted, he says, to Clive James: "You know, there are two kinds of riches: not as much as you think; and more than you can possibly imagine." His fortune, he assures me with an amiable chuckle, is more the former than the latter, and there are taxes to be paid. All the same, at 10% of the gross, we are perhaps talking £5m after tax. And it's far from over. "What difference has it made to my life?" he asks. "Well, I don't have to think before buying a book. I can buy nice wood for carving, and I'm no longer worried about security in old age." But there is another difference upon which his appealing modesty is not inclined to enlarge. He has been donating money to the victims of torture.
