I read this recent profile of Philip Pullman in The Independent and found it very interesting. You would think there is little about Pullman to write at this point - he has given hundreds of interviews and his books have been analyzed in dozens of different ways - but this one is very different; this one is about his father.

As it turns out, Pullman's father died in the RAF in 1954 when he was very young. He was always told his father died a hero but never sought to find out exactly what the circumstances were of his death. The journalist in the piece (presumably with Pullman's permission) does find out though and it is a rather complicated story as most about war are. The point of the article is not so much what Pullman's father did or didn't do though, but more why the author keeps writing about men who mimic his idea of his father:

It is not a side issue: adventurers, heroes and absent fathers appear in almost everything he writes. Sally's dad drowns in Pullman's first hit, The Ruby in the Smoke. The explorer Lord Asriel strides through the multimillion-selling trilogy His Dark Materials. The airman Lee Scoresby is the hero of the most recent book, Once Upon a Time in the North.

The themes emerge again in the strip he has just devised for a new comic, The DFC. The first weekly publication of its kind in 25 years, this is an attempt to recapture and remake the spirit of the great comics of the Fifties for a new generation. The first edition will reach subscribers this week, and its main attraction will be Pullman's "Adventures of John Blake". Drawn by the illustrator John Aggs in a style inspired by Japanese manga, it is about a boy who travels the oceans of the world on a schooner shrouded in a mysterious sea fog. He appears to be an orphan. "It is disconcerting," Pullman said, half-seriously, "to realise that one is writing the same story again and again."

That "same story again and again". On one level that is not true - anyone who has read the Sally Lockhart mysteries knows they are very different in plot and setting from His Dark Materials. But certain key elements do seem to be repeated - that of missing or distant fathers, of father figures who save children, of heroic men like RAF pilots. Pullman had a very kind stepfather, but clearly he still misses the man he barely knew, and chases the memories he can not forget.

I know why he does this.

I am writing the last chapter of The Map of My Dead Pilots right now. This was supposed to be a chapter about revisiting the Company (then out of business) in the summer of 2007. I did not plan it this way but I was back on the ramp last year, nearly ten years exactly to the day that I quit. It was eerie going back - not because so much had changed but because so much was still the same. Except for the silence, for the broken airplanes where ours once used to be parked and ready to go, the Company looked exactly the same. I could close my eyes and be back to 1997 in a second as I stood there and that is what I did. I saw myself, my friends, the bosses, everybody exactly as we were back then. But the thing about 1997, the thing I did not expect to remember, is that the other truth about that year is that my father was alive - he was well. In 1997 I was working at the Company, one of the guys I worked with had not yet crashed and died in the Yukon River and my father was down in Florida beating cancer. All was right with the world.

In retrospect, 1997 was a very good year.

I planned to write about how it was to be back there and the strangeness of it, of envisioning us as we were ten years before and missing us all so much; missing what was, in spite of the hard work, a very good time in my life. But my father brought me back again to simply how much I miss him. The final chapter is now as much about him as it is about the Company, as it is about me. He became part of my first Alaska aviation book, the novel, purely by accident and he is here now, again, in the memoir for similar reasons. In the manuscript for Winter the main character is a teenage girl who finds family secrets in the papers her deceased father left behind. Her story is far more dramatic than anything I knew but the loss is the same; in everything I write the loss is the same.

In everything I write, that loss will always be the same.

What the final chapter of Map will ultimately be I have no idea - there is my agent to give her opinion and there will (hopefully) be one of those interested editors who elect to publish it and weigh in with their own thoughts. I don't know if it will reflect what I have written in the past few days. But that won't change that I have to write it; that I don't have any choice in the story I am telling. Some parts of you life, you just can't leave behind.

From my father's last letter to me:

February 23, 1999

Please take care of yourself and be careful. Love, Dad

I went home in April; he died June 5th. It was one week after his 60th birthday. This is the ending I did not know in 1997; ten years later it is the one I could not deny.