Someone on Facebook recommended this audio recording while I was on holidays. Internet service was inadequate to listen to it, and I’m so glad. Instead, I listened to it last week, just after finishing Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean At the End Of The Lane.
The recording is an hour long discussion between Philip Pullman and Neil Gaiman. I found it fascinating.
I discovered Neil Gaiman and Philip Pullman both loved Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons when they were boys. It was one of my favorites, too. I laughed as they quoted, “Better drowned than duffers. If not duffers, won’t drown.”
I wish I could have seen their faces as they discussed illustrations (it was amusingly inappropriate).
Then Pullman started reading at the same paragraph in The Ocean At The End Of The Land that caught my attention so thoroughly that I marked the page and planned to blog about it. I felt like Gaiman was trying to reach deeper than psychological or mythological – deeper still, into physics and creation and imagination. OMG I love his brain. Then they talked about imagination as a genuine way of exploring reality.
I’d strongly recommend listening to it, just after finishing The Ocean At The End Of The Lane.
Maureen