Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
A wondrous ode to nature's astonishing beauty – and an elegy for all the life we are in the midst of destroying. This is a book filled with love and hope and whiskers and wings, by turns ravishing and devastating. No one sings the praises of the world quite like Katherine Rundell." Events of recent weeks may have encouraged some to think about longevity and constancy. But when we value “living memory” we seem able only to measure it in human terms. To be truly long-memoried on this Earth, you would probably have to be a Greenland shark. As Katherine Rundell reports, a Greenland shark presently cruising the dark depths of the Arctic Ocean might have been doing so even as the plague swept London. Its great-great-grandparents may have known Julius Caesar, so to speak. It takes 150 years for a female to reach sexual maturity. “For thousands of years Greenland sharks have swum in silence, as above ground the world has burned, rebuilt, burned again.” They also smell strongly of pee.
KR: My next book, which I hope will be out in about a year, will be another children’s novel – I’m working on it now, and I think, after deleting quite a lot of it, and starting again, it’s finally falling into place, and I have that fantastic feeling of something that is, after a lot of false starts, finally taking off. I’ve had a novel for adults for a long time – it’s something I work at in snatched moments, late at night, so I think it won’t happen for a fair few years: but I hope to finish it eventually. When it comes to what we should do, however, things get a bit woolly. After a typically vivid account of seahorse courtship and reproduction, Rundell urges us to “remember the seahorse” every morning and “scream with awe and not stop screaming until we fall asleep” or, a bit more practically, to “refuse to eat anything that is taken from the ocean by overexploitative nonselective fishing”. Elsewhere, she makes the rather vague suggestion that we “urgently seek out ways to aid child nutrition” in impoverished countries, so that people there are not forced to hunt endangered creatures. It is a pity that this element of the book is so thin and impractical. Yet Rundell is incapable of writing a dull sentence and it could hardly be bettered as an exuberant celebration of everything from bats, crows and hedgehogs to narwhals and wombats Even more disturbingly, Rundell argues that extinction is “not just happening because of our inertia: it’s incentive-driven” – through a ghastly process known as “extinction speculation”. Those who trade in Norwegian shark fin, rare bear bladders, rhino horn and even frozen bluefin tuna would love these species to go extinct, because prices would go through the roof. KR: The World Wildlife Fund for land, whose work I’ve admire all my life, and a wonderful small charity called Blue Ventures for the sea.
Broadcasts
BB: You write in The Golden Mole: ‘We wake in the morning and as we put on our trousers we should remember the seahorse and we should scream with awe and not stop screaming until we fall asleep…’ Half the book’s royalties are going to charity, which ones? KR: My colleagues at All Souls have always been very generous about my slightly idiosyncratic career!
Rundell shows us that the human imagination often looks pedestrian next to nature’s real ingenuity; our fairytales can seem like mundane placeholders for more wonderful truths. It was once proposed that storks “wintered on the moon”; we couldn’t have imagined that a mere two centuries later their wings would reveal the key to human fight. No Roman naturalist or German scholastic would have dared suggest swifts fly the equivalent of five times round the Earth every year. The US Navy models underwater missiles on the body shape of bluefin tuna. But biotech is yet to emulate the properties of the golden orb spider’s web, which can last years.The Golden Mole is shot through with Rundell’s characteristic wit and swagger. The position of the mother wombat’s pouch, facing down, with the baby wombat peering out from between her legs “explains why it was a kangaroo who got to be in Winnie-the-Pooh”. Edward the Confessor is “a king so morally upright he was practically levitating”. Amelia Earhart is “the valiant, hell-for-leather aviatrix with the face of a lion” who, Rundell speculates, may have been eaten by a hermit crab. Not that Rundell condemns hermit crabs. In fact, learning about how they live in everything from tin cans to coconut halves, she finds: “More and more, in these darker days, I admire resourcefulness. I love their tenacity: forging lives from the shells of the dead, making homes from the debris that the world, in its chaos, has left out for them.” By title alone The Golden Mole sounds as though it would be a charming book, a cross between a treasury and a bestiary. The subtitle is indeed “And Other Living Treasure”. At first glance its structure, short essays each prefaced with a beautiful, grey-on-gold illustration by Talya Baldwin, might suggest a children’s wildlife encyclopaedia or a coffee-table Christmas gift book. Rundell is indeed a children’s author and has been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal; the book is indeed charming. She has mastered a sprightly, enthused tone for her essays, which come at their subjects from unexpected angles. She is good with the arresting opening line: “It was, perhaps, a hermit crab that ate Amelia Earhart.” “Hares have always been thought magic.” There is much lore and plenty of what the Americans call “fun facts”. Take hermit crabs, for example. Coconut hermit crabs are land crabs, so called because they can prise open a coconut. They can live to be 100 and grow to a metre across, “too large to fit in a bathtub, exactly the right size for a nightmare”. Fun facts, perhaps, but her purpose is serious. KR: I was recently part of a Royal Society of Literature committee that involved, in the search of Fellows from further afield, reading a lot of literature in translation, so I have just recently fallen in love with the novels of Yoko Ogawa and The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vásquez.
It was careful and precise with language, grim as well as funny – a sort of Famous Five meets Heart of Darkness – and, crucially, didn’t speak down to its tween readers. The Book of Hopes: Words and Pictures to Comfort, Inspire and Entertain edited by Katherine Rundell KR: In a dream world – I don’t think this will ever happen – I’ve never seen a hummingbird (there are none in Europe: people who think they’ve seen one have usually seen a hummingbird hawk moth) so I would love to go to Cuba to see the Bee Hummingbird – the smallest bird in the world, which weighs less than two grams. They have iridescent throats, and are just five and a half centimetres long – barely the length of a finger. KR: I do! I have several full notebooks, and a cascade of notes on my phone, many of which I’ll never use. Frank Cottrell Boyce, a writer I admire hugely, always says that writers should keep a diary: but that it should be by force limited to a single sentence a day: the most interesting, funniest, saddest thing you heard that day, so that at the end of the year you have 365 interesting sentences. I’m imperfect at keeping up with it, but I love the idea. Often my single sentence will be a note of something I read about the natural world. I haven’t yet read Super-Infinite. But, early in the new year, as I was scanning my piles of unread books for something diverting, I noticed that a publisher had sent me another work of Rundell’s.
Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?
Great Deal 
New Comment