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

Product Information

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.

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. 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? Despite being a firm fiction fan, Chris Deerin stumbled upon a slim volume of essays in 2022 that he can’t stop thinking about. 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.” I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t be enchanted, fascinated, & deeply concerned by this bestiary of the world’s most extraordinary & endangered animals.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. 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. 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.

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? You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. 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. Dolphins whistle to their young in the womb for months before the birth (Image: Wullie Marr/DC Thomson)KR: My colleagues at All Souls have always been very generous about my slightly idiosyncratic career! 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. 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.

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."

A literary wonder

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. 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? 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”. 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.

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. It is among my proudest boasts, that I was massive Rundell fan before she became a national treasure."For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.