Christopher is stunned when he discovers a passage to the Archipelago: a cluster of magical islands where all the creatures of myth still live and breed and thrive in their thousands. There he meets Mal: a girl from the islands, who is in possession of a flying coat and a baby griffin, and who is being pursued by a killer. Together they embark on an urgent quest to discover why the creatures are suddenly perishing, voyaging across the wild splendour of the Archipelago, where sphinxes hold secrets and centaurs do murder, in a bid to save both the islands and the world beyond them from a rising evil – before it’s too late.
An incredible, vivid and moving novel, Rundell’s Impossible Creatures is an absolute masterclass in characterisation, exquisite worldbuilding and language that sparkles with wit and charm and pathos whilst being driven by a powerful plot.
What I Liked
- The dual characters of Christopher and Mal were a brilliant pair of deuteragonists
- The celebration of the power and fearlessness of friendship, without it descending into a mawkish romance
- The pacing in the novel never let up – every scene and sentence was necessary
- The breadth and scope of Rundell’s imagination
What Could Have Been Different
What if you could visit a land where all the mythical creatures that you thought were merely legends and stories proved to be real? Imagine you could step into another realm parallel to our own mundane one and discover dragons, unicorns and sphinxes? On the surface, this is not an entirely original concept – Narnia springs to mind of course, but so too do Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale or American Gods or Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman – but it is an extraordinarily powerful temptation. What child – what person – would not open the Wardrobe door? Who would not be charmed and terrified in equal measure – awestruck – by discovering that our myths were literal and real. Who would not want to live in or visit a world where a girl could be gifted a coat that allowed her to fly?
And Rundell’s creatures are very real in her novel: her writing and language gives them a weight and physicality than is usual: the kludde – the first impossible creature we are told of right from chapter one, is
“a creature as large as a wolf. It was black, built like a fighting dog, its teeth bared – but where it should have had ears it had two sparks of blue flame, and its breath, coming hard and fast, was a metallic rasp… The shrieking of its breath rose, piercing, agonising, reverberating across the hill. The creature sprang…”
This is no Mr Tumnus! And alongside the kludde, we encounter creatures from a range of myths around the world, some familair and others less so: al-mirajes, horned hares from Arabic myth, griffins, unicorns and karkadanns, mermaids and neirids, a feisty ratatoska who, instead of ferrying messages up the Yggdrassil tree navigates a boat.
Rundell kicks the novel off with two chapters of violent confrontation – Christopher’s encounter with the Kludde on the Scottish hillside, and Mal’s encounter with a murderer in the Archipelago – and the pacing never lets up from that point onwards. After a quick rewind in time to introduce the characters of Chistopher and Mal in more detail – and to see Mal’s concern that the world of the Archipelago seems to be dying, we see Mal and her pet griffin flee the murderer through a portal into Chrsitopher’s – and our mundane – world and help save him from the Kludde.
The novel then really picks up as Chrsitopher returns with Mal and helps her flee the murderer on her side of the portal – aided by unicorns and the sailor / berserker Nighthand. As the children seek help intially – and naively perhaps – from adult authority, they are rejected by the red tape and processes and procedures of the adult world and there are touches here on what we lose as we reach adulthood. Christopher and Mal’s joy and wonder and awe and fierce love for the world of the Archipelago is excluded by all the signs barring children from officialdom. And it is, perhaps, one of the things that Rundell’s writing celebrates in The Wolf Wilder, Rooftoppers and Super-Infinite the sense of wonder and awe and magic that the world around us and language has – a fierce wildness which shines through Rundell’s prose.
Fortunately, as often happens on these quests, allies are found in Nighthand the berserker, in a scholar half-nereid and in sphinxes. We learn the cause of the ailing of the Archipelago, and we learn of the dangerous path required to remedy it. This is not a novel that shies aware from its conventions and its tropes: it is a “chosen one” quest narrative and it pulses to those familiar beats. But what Rundell does invest in her characters and her language so much vitality that she makes the familiar feel fresh and original in remarkable ways.
The friendship between Christopher and Mal, the emotional heart of the novel, is wonderfully created and their innocent fierce faith in each other reminded me of Lyra and Will’s in Northern Lights or Kellen and Nettle in Frances Hardinge’s Unraveller. They are a pairing who will be remembered for some time after finishing the novel.
This is a young adult / middle grade level book but it is not without its violence and its brutality, and there are losses along the way for our heroes that might be upsetting for younger readers. My daughter is 10 and I am in two minds as whether she would manage the book emotionally. But the brutality and nastiness of the world, the chaos and the insensitivity and the selfishness, are central to the plot: the world is ailing because the immortal – a perpetually reincarnated soul from the beginning of time – once was unable to cope with all that negativity and violence and “said no”. He took a potion of forgetting and neither he nor any future reincarnations remembered what they were. The message – or perhaps the challenge – in the book for all of us is whether we can look at the world, acknowledge all that is rotten and cruel, but still find enough beauty and love and joy to say “yes”, to say “yes, notwithstanding every dark thing in it, this world has worth”.
It is a remarkarble novel and fully deserves the accolades and prasie that it has garnered recently including the Waterstones Book of the Year, triumphing over Zadie Smith, Rebecca Yarros – whom booktok seems to love – Ann Patchett and Rebecca F. Kuang amongst others. Please do read it!
And the excellent news is, that there is the potential for, and did I read somewhere that there was the intention to write, a series….
