Q. Children who move frequently, as you did, often learn to size up other people rapidly. Was that true of you as a boy?
A. Yes. You make friends with people and then you have to leave and go somewhere else, and within the first morning in your new school, you come up against people who've known each other for years and years. You're the stranger, and you have to find a way of fitting in, which usually involves changing the way you speak, and your accent. That is why Lyra's voice changes throughout the story. When, for instance, in The Golden Compass she goes to the Fens, among the Gyptian people, she finds herself almost unconsciously imitating the way they speak. You have to do that, and you have to work out quite quickly where the power lies in a new class of kids – because the power of course never lies with the teacher. It always lies with one or another of the other kids.
Philip Pullman, in The Wand in the Word: Conversations with Writers of Fantasy, compiled and edited by Leonard S. Marcus, Candlewick Press, 2009
A. Yes. You make friends with people and then you have to leave and go somewhere else, and within the first morning in your new school, you come up against people who've known each other for years and years. You're the stranger, and you have to find a way of fitting in, which usually involves changing the way you speak, and your accent. That is why Lyra's voice changes throughout the story. When, for instance, in The Golden Compass she goes to the Fens, among the Gyptian people, she finds herself almost unconsciously imitating the way they speak. You have to do that, and you have to work out quite quickly where the power lies in a new class of kids – because the power of course never lies with the teacher. It always lies with one or another of the other kids.
Philip Pullman, in The Wand in the Word: Conversations with Writers of Fantasy, compiled and edited by Leonard S. Marcus, Candlewick Press, 2009
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