Dæmon Voices: Essays on Storytelling by Philip Pullman (review)

In the past year, three books by three very different, major writers of fantasy and storytelling have appeared that deserve our attention: Ursula Le Guin's No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters (2017), Robert Bly's More Than True: The Wisdom of Fairy Tales (2018), and Philip Pullman's Dæmon Voices: Essays on Storytelling (2018). They all seem to be a reckoning with the significance of writing and stories of all kinds—a settling of urgent ontological matters with words written before the gifted writers and their words die and fade away. Indeed, shortly after Le Guin published her soul-searching memoir, the eighty-one-year-old passed away and left us with a desire to learn more from her. The ninety-one-year-old Bly is still alive and feels impelled to leave some insipid remarks based on even more insipid Jungian jargon as his legacy before he dies. And young seventy-one-year-old Pullman is concerned that the messages he has conveyed in over thirty essays and reviews will reach the minds of people so that his words might challenge or alter the views of readers before he bites the dust.

Of the three books, only Pullman's Dæmon Voices is worth perusing for readers of fairy tales and folklore because Le Guin focuses more on her desperate endeavor to draw meaning from her poems and daily life and because Bly's summaries and comments on six stories are simplistic interpretations that other devoted Jungians have mis-conceived much clearer than he has. It is Pullman's book that is refreshing and presents ideas with which we must still cope if we are to understand what it is exactly that we must revere in provocative imaginative writing.

Thanks to Simon Mason, who collected the articles and reviews, readers may easily access the essays that appeal to them most. Mason has categorized the materials according to fourteen topics that include children's literature, education and story, folktales, fairy tales and epics, science and story, reading, among other themes. It is not widely known that Pullman, famous for his trilogy His Dark Materials (1995–2000), has spent the past thirty or more years writing for various newspapers and journals. That is, Pullman is a politically engaged writer who is not afraid to change his views and challenge accepted authoritative views of literature and life. Almost all the articles printed in this book include a postscript by Pullman in which he comments on the past to bring the article to the present.

Given the size of the book and the numerous topics covered by Pullman, it is difficult to review or squeeze all the articles into a unified ideological box. Instead, I would like to comment on a few of the essays that are fundamentally Pullmanesque. In fact, Pullman's own writing is stamped by his moral integrity, humor, and pursuit of truth. For example, in his essay "Imaginary Friends: Are Stories Anti-scientific?" Pullman refutes Richard Dawkins's positivist assertion or question as to whether fairy tales might be pernicious. After citing studies and research on how children respond to the world around them through stories that enable them to cope with experience, Pullman recounts his own childhood readings in which he interacted with such figures as Davy Crockett, King Arthur, Dick Tracy, and the Moomins. Then he states, "Now I think that those experiences were an important part of my moral education as well as the development of my imagination. By acting out stories of heroism and sacrifice and (to use a fine phrase that has become a cliché) grace under pressure, I was building patterns of behavior and expectation into my moral understanding. I might fall short if ever I were really called on, but at least I'd know what was the right thing to do" (309–10).

In another essay, "Writing Fantasy Realistically," Pullman confesses that he did not read much fantasy...