Children’s book author Katherine Rundell tries to find joy in a ‘world on fire’

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Not so long ago, Katherine Rundell was accused of murder.

Before you go looking for this children’s author’s mugshot, however, you should know that her alleged crime was against a fantastical creature of her own creation: Gelifen, a baby griffin who is the last of his kind in a world where magical things are rapidly disappearing, and whose tragic death – spoiler alert – caused one young correspondent to dash off an accusatory missive to Rundell.

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“I got a fantastic piece of fan mail from a kid. It was very sweet, and then at the bottom, there was just a little portrait of me and underneath it just said, ‘Murderer,’ ” says Rundell, laughing across a video call from her office in England.

To provoke the kind of reaction that motivates a child to put pen to paper – particularly when your competition is algorithms and screens – speaks to the phenomenon that is Rundell’s No.1 internationally bestselling children’s fantasy novel Impossible Creatures.

In the tradition of all great children’s literature, it is not a book that coddles its readers, young or old: The stakes are high – two children tasked with finding out what is killing all of the magical creatures before it’s too late – and there is as much darkness as there is light.

“I believe very passionately that children are not strangers to grief or sorrow or their own cruelty,” says Rundell, who’s published several award-winning children’s books and non-fiction for adults while also working as a fellow of two Oxford colleges. “I believe a great children’s book has to be able to acknowledge all that we know about the human heart, both its capacity for snide and jealousy and violence and anger and dread, because if you acknowledge those, the children will believe you when you speak to them of joy, of hope, of what it is to love and care and endure.”

We live, Rundell continues, in a very bleak time – “a world on fire, with more flames to come” – where the ferocious hope in the triumph of good over evil that undergirds those same great children’s novels has never been more necessary.

“One of the things I love about great children’s books is they insist over and over that it is still worth teaching children how to rejoice,” she says.

The Globe chatted with Rundell about particularities of writing for children – especially those in the digital age – and why the stories children hear can have such a profound impact on the rest of their lives.

Would you say kids are a tougher crowd than adults?

They’re a different crowd. One thing is that they’re a mystery to us. I remember very vividly what it was to be a child, but there is still a block between me and my childhood self, and that is the block of 20 years. I’m more connected to my childhood than most, partly because it’s my job. I have booklets of things that I adored as a kid, those passions and profoundly child-like behaviours and eccentricities – the desire to make a potion, to keep a secret. But because children do not have the vocabulary to express all of their hinterland, it’s harder to know a child in some ways than it is to know an adult. Their passions are more opaque, both to them and to us, but their passions are colossal, and their thirst for justice is perhaps the greatest it is at any point in their human existence. Their capacity for love is so deep and so profound. I wanted to write a book that would salute them.

In Impossible Creatures, the highs are so high and the lows are so low. Were you mirroring that emotional range kids have?

Exactly that. Children experience the world so intensely. Part of that is the “first-time” quality. Every year of your life, you are doing thousands of things for the first time. Big things like taking the train for the first time, or small things like unlocking the door at home. It’s this constant state of discovery and adjustment. It’s why for children, the world feels so vivid and bold and beautiful, but also so bewildering. That’s one of the reasons children need books. The world itself is too big to read, but in a children’s book, you can understand the entirety of the fictional world, and it gives you the experience of understanding. It gives you the experience of gaining knowledge.

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Do you have a gauge for what might be “too much” to include in a children’s book?

It’s something I think about all the time. You want to make sure that when a child is reading a book of yours, they’re trusting you totally, and you have to try to not let down that trust. I will always make sure that because of the age I’m writing for, which is 9 to 12, there might be violence but there won’t be the kind of graphic violence that will haunt a child. There will be sorrow, but it will be the sorrow of real life, of real loss.

And then there’s this really crucial idea of the mismatch between a sanitized children’s book and a child’s experience of the internet and of television. I want to give them some iterations of dread and of fear, because with a book you can tame it and shape it for them, and you can take them gently by the hand and say, “Look, there will be loss, but there will be such huge glory.” Whereas kids by the time they reach age 12 will have seen many profoundly graphic murders on the television, on the internet, on the news. We have to accept we live in a moment where children see darkness, so if we’re going to offer them darkness in books we need to do it as humanely as possible.

Are you conscious of being in competition with television and the internet?

When I write, I’m mostly propelled by the interior engine that was built over the last 37 years, and which was built by quite big, complicated books. The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Emma, Dickens, Trollope, Baldwin, Nabokov. It’s so important, not just for generosity but for democracy, that we do not talk down to children. That we do not allow ourselves as a society to lose the capacity for the stamina of approaching a big text. Within a big text, you find nuanced ideas that cannot be summarized in a paragraph.

I am also very aware that we are writing for our time. I’m not writing for the kids of the 1950s. I’m writing for kids who are right now 10 or 12 years old. What I think they need is wooing. They need to be lured in. For instance, my book starts with two very short chapters. They do get longer, and they also get more complicated. What I think you do is lay a path before them, and you scatter the breadcrumbs, and you hope that by the time you’ve hooked them, you can start to stretch their attention, their stamina, what they think they’re capable of.

You’re also writing for the children of the pandemic. Do you think there is something specific to being born in, say, 2014 that you react differently to this book?

It’s such an interesting question. How different is this generation because of the sacrifices that we as a culture asked them to make? My hunch is that there are more universals than differences, but the differences are very real. Children still want comfort, love, adventure, jokes, passion, but I think the comfortableness with reading has probably shifted with this generation because we as a generation of parents perhaps left them to more screens than any other generation because it was the only way to get through the time to do work. For these kids who have been deprived of certain forms of community and of rest, how do we give it back to them? And how do we make sure that lack doesn’t become for them something in adulthood that is really painful and destructive?

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