Katherine Rundell

Katherine Rundell is the latest Brit to be both a high-end scholar and a successful author of children's books. If you're curious about her literary scholarship check out this Tyler Cowen interview, or a snippet on my blog here.

I recently read two of Rundell's children's books, Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (2011) and The Wolf Wilder (2015).

Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms tells the story of a young white girl who grows up on a farm in Zimbabwe – like Katherine Rundell, for a while. She loves her life. She spends it running around the farm her father owns and in the surrounding bush and playing with black boys. Her name is Wilhelmina but her father calls her Wildcat. She can ride a horse, manage baboons and hyenas, and roast bananas in a fire, but her book learning is severely limited and she has no inkling of bourgeois manners. Then her beloved father dies and her guardian marries an evil witch of a woman who insists that young Wildcat be sent to boarding school in England. She is terrified and humiliated by the routine there and her treatment by the other girls. So she rebels and runs away, spending one night in a monkey enclosure at the London Zoo, before eventually going back with a new determination to face down her persecutors and make something of herself.

Wolf wilders, we are told, are people who take the half-tamed wolves that Russian aristocrats used to sometimes keep as pets and return them to the wild. The Wolf Wilder concerns a girl name Feodora who lives with her mother in a house in the Russian woods, helping wolves who grew up in dachas learn how to survive in the forest. "Wolves," the narrator muses, "like children, are not meant to lead calm lives." Feo knows little about the world and does not care to. Until, that is, a sinister army officer named General Rakov shows up and threatens to kill her mother for keeping wolves. This leads to various adventures and dangers, in the course of which Feo meets a would-be peasant revolutionary who is trying to raise his neighbors to fight Rakov. So Feo's childhood rebellion gets mixed up with a bit of real rebellion, although in the end little comes of that.

Rundell's writing is fine, the stories are ok, and if I had any younglings around I would be happy to read these aloud to them.

The thing that struck me most about both of these stories was their reliance on the assumption, or maybe assertion, that children are wild things who naturally have more in common with monkeys or wolves than they do with grownups. The adult world of rules and manners and propriety is, we are to assume, horrific to any child with spirit. We come into the world wild, and if we must learn to fit in, we should never forget that we were once wild things who wanted only to live free.

This is utterly foreign to my own childhood, which was abolutely unwild. Nor is it the only way to construct an adventure for children; in many stories it is assumed that regular childhood is boring, and we must leave the safey and comfort of home to find adventure elsewhere. Bilbo left the Shire on the road to the Lonely Mountain; Wendy, John, and Michael flew out of the nursery with Peter Pan and Tinkerbell to have their adventures in Neverland.

So I wonder how actual children see this, and if they are more likely to relate to Wildcat and Feo or to see them as outlandish and alien.

I also wonder about Katherine Rundell; does part of her seethe at the confines of Cambridge and its rules? Or is she a mild-mannered person who likes her adventures safely within the pages of a book?