The Golden Mole: and Other Living Treasure: 'A rare and magical book.' Bill Bryson

Product Information

From bears to bats to hermit crabs, a witty, intoxicating paean to Earth's wondrous creatures [...] shot through with Rundell's characteristic wit and swagger." The Book of Hopes: Words and Pictures to Comfort, Inspire and Entertain edited by Katherine Rundell KR: I love children’s books for the huge possibilities they offer: for vivid writing, wild imaginings. Children’s writing necessitates its own particular discipline, and I find that discipline a delight and a challenge: you need you to distil enormous ideas – ideas about our most vulnerable heart – into something tight and memorable. I think that challenge appealed to me: and the books I read as a child remain some of the most important to me, even now. 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.

And the final criterion was just love: creatures I longed to have an excuse to spend a month or so reading books about. The Golden Mole – the only iridescent mammal, which does not know that it shines – is one of my favourites – and lent itself to the broader idea of golden and treasure. (In the sense that, what is the finest treasure? It’s the living world, and the earth it depends on.) 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 BB: The alive-ness of your interest in the world electrifies and connects all your work. Do you worry that it’s filtered through a screen or smartphone for many children?Rundell’s talents stretch beyond kindling young minds, however. The book that grabbed so much attention last year is entitled Super-Infinite, and is a biography of the English metaphysical poet John Donne, who, across the late 16th and early 17th centuries, also found time to be a lawyer, a naval adventurer who fought beside Raleigh, an MP, a rake, and the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral. BB: You’re a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, and published an acclaimed book, Super-Infinite, on John Donne this year. Where do your adventure stories for children fit in? 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.

BB: ‘There is nothing like climbing a drainpipe at night to remind you just how dark dark can be’ is a line from Rooftoppers. Do you like to live dangerously? 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.” Dolphins whistle to their young in the womb for months before the birth (Image: Wullie Marr/DC Thomson)Rundell is very strong on the tales humans have told about the natural world. We now know that unicorn horns were actually narwhal tusks, that hedgehogs are lactose intolerant, that drinking bats’ blood does not make you invisible. But we are still making mistakes, and we still know very little. Take the Somali golden mole, whose entry on the International Union for Conservation of Nature list says “data deficient” because “we do not know what shares the world with us, and in what numbers”. Kathleen Jamie is a poet and editor of “Antlers of Water: Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland” (Canongate) The world is more astonishing, more miraculous and more wonderful than our wildest imaginings. In this passionately persuasive and sharply funny book, Katherine Rundell tells us how and why. BB: Your sense of wonder about the creatures you write about is infectious. Who inspires you in environmental activism? Rundell’s sentences are small miracles that charm, like a soft hand on the reader’s cheek. “The first lemur I ever met was female, and she tried to bite me, which was fair, because I was trying to touch her, and because humans have done nothing to recommend themselves to lemurs.”“I once met a half-tame she-wolf… she smelled… of dust and blood. She did not want to meet my eye. Wolves are like the fairy tales they prowl through: wild, and not on any body’s side.” And on, beguilingly, she goes.

As 2022 drew to a close, I noticed that many of the “best of the year” lists repeated one particular author’s name and book.It is among my proudest boasts, that I was massive Rundell fan before she became a national treasure." Rundell’s selection is rangy and personalised. There’s bound to be animals one feels to have been unfairly overlooked, and I would have liked to see her on at least one bird of prey, or declining beetle, or endangered cat. The Bengal tiger would have been too much to ask: a whole book would be required to explore the references and resonances that accompany it. The lynx, though, is secretive and mysterious enough not to have already exhausted our cultural imaginations, and could fit snugly into one of these short entries. Some animals that would have most brilliantly galvanised Rundell in the telling and fit well into her format, rich as they are in folklore, misunderstanding and wild factoids, are doing just fine. The spotted hyena, much maligned and endlessly fascinating in terms of legend and science, by and large doesn’t need the help of a book like this. Rundell’s latest LRB piece has been published this month, and is on hummingbirds. As it’s not included here, maybe there’s a second edition of this golden treasury being planned. Dolphins whistle to their young in the womb for months before the birth, and for two weeks afterward – the others in the pod remain quiet so as not to confuse the unborn calf as it learns its mother’s call. 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." 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.