Try finding a theatrical way of doing that.Staging this epic has itself been an epic task: it has taken 18 months to put together, has a cast of more than 30, and stars a former James Bond – Timothy Dalton – and Patricia Hodge, as well as younger actors Anna Maxwell Martin as Lyra and Dominic Cooper as Will. A film, with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard, is in prospect and, in the meantime, you can see the stage version at the National.Pullman, the first children’s author to win the Whitbread Book of the Year prize, has distanced himself from the film, but takes a more hands-on attitude to the two plays – adapted by Nicholas Wright, whose version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters was a hit earlier this year – that make up the stage version. Pullman himself read the audiobook version, then it was dramatised by Lavinia Murray for Radio 4 in January (available on CD or cassette) and now Lyra’s Oxford, in which Pullman maps his heroine’s home town, is in the shops. All the other names I list cover Allah as well.”The trilogy is not so much a teen cult as a big industry. The books may have sold millions of copies, winning prizes and plaudits galore, but their story has taken on a life of its own.

The title itself is a quotation from Book II of Milton’s Paradise Lost. “But the point is,” he stresses, “that the Muslim tradition follows on from the Jewish and Christian tradition and uses the same basic myth, which comes from the same monotheistic origins. The names I give in the passage are just as offensive to Muslims, I hope, as they are to Christians.”As you’d expect from reading His Dark Materials, Pullman – a slim fiftysomething former teacher – is hot on the history of religion. He was an angel like ourselves.”But Pullman has no patience with this kind of criticism. “Yes, I missed out the name Allah, but I also missed out Dieu and Gott,” he says acidly. When asked if he’s afraid of doing a Rushdie, he replies: “Okay, right, the next time it’s reprinted I’ll include the name Allah.” He also points out that “he didn’t call himself Allah – that’s just an Arabic word for God.

This barb refers to the passage in The Amber Spyglass where an angel says: “The Authority, God the creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adoni, the King, the Father, the Almighty – those were the names he gave himself He was never the creator. Teachers should steer clear.” As a Christian teacher, he sees the books as “anti-Christian propaganda” aimed at vulnerable youngsters; a kind of literary child abuse.He also shrewdly points out that Pullman “is not bold enough to list Allah among the names attributed to the Authority,” and suggests that “this omission signals the author’s attempt to insulate himself” from the risk of a Rushdie-style fatwa. This production is in poor taste, given the timing and the content. They tell the story of two special children, Lyra and Will, on their quest for Dust, which has the power to dissolve universes.

For them, it’s a coming- of-age adventure: before they arrive at the republic of heaven, they have to deal with a repressive church, and with a parallel world inhabited by rebellious angels and soul-eating spectres. In the end, an aged god dies.Rupert Kaye, the head of the Association of Christian Teachers, sums up the argument against the show: “Pullman sets out to undermine and attack the Christian faith His blasphemy is shameless. Catholic and Protestant groups have criticised the timing of the show, with a spokesman for the Church of England saying: “Given that Christmas is a major Christian festival, His Dark Materials wouldn’t seem an obvious choice.”

Philip Pullman has no intention of being the next Salman Rushdie. As his bestselling trilogy, His Dark Materials, is staged by the National Theatre, headlines have been grabbed not by the artistic endeavour of dramatising the epic, but by accusations of blasphemy. Philip Pullman has no intention of being the next Salman Rushdie. In Mark Joffe’s The Man Who Sued God, Connolly plays an Australian fisherman whose boat is struck by lightning. When his insurance company refuses to cough up on the grounds that they

December’s two comedy releases, The Actors and The Man Who Sued God, were so abysmal that I almost could not bring myself to finish watching them Only inertia kept me pinned to the sofa.