Query: can an atheist believe in faeries, boggarts, fauns and water sprites? I’d say no, myself. Once you give up on God and angels, including fallen ones, you’re in the cold world of materialism, where people explain all these things away as in the worst sense, fairy stories – viz, untrue.

Query: can an atheist believe in faeries, boggarts, fauns and water sprites? I’d say no, myself. Once you give up on God and angels, including fallen ones, you’re in the cold world of materialism, where people explain all these things away as in the worst sense, fairy stories – viz, untrue.

Philip Pullman is on the horns of this disagreeable dilemma. He is the children’s author for the secular age, a fine storyteller with an enormous dressing-up box of long forgotten spellings, words, countries … The stories inhabit the actual world of the quite recent past, but it’s a parallel universe with fantastical twists and luxuriant nostalgia for, in particular, the Oxford of the 1960s which he attended as a student.

But he is also the atheist author who killed God. In his “Northern Lights” trilogy, the Ancient of Days simply dies, once he’s exposed to light and air. It’s the death of God, or rather, of the idea of God. The bogey in this story is the Catholic Church, as imagined by a seventeenth-century Protestant: it’s called the Magisterium. The villains are Catholic priests.

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