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The Neverfear
Katherine Rundell
Bloomsbury
Reviewed by Elspeth McLean
The third book in Katherine Rundell’s Impossible Creatures series will be snapped up by those entranced by the first two.
Its readership will no doubt get a boost in the aftermath of the Queen’s Christmas Present Initiative in the United Kingdom which will see every Year 6 child there gifted the initial book in the series — some 800,000 books.
The Christmas gifts will mark the end of the UK government’s National Year of Reading.
Whether other authors are miffed at being left out of benefiting from this largesse is not clear, but it is not surprising Rundell’s work is so highly prized.
Rundell sees fantasy as an effective vehicle for teaching children about humanity, and for them to encounter philosophy and big ideas about truth and endurance and courage and death.
But she also recognises the value of a good joke which she says “honours us all”.
Amen to that.
If, like me, you are not that enthusiastic about fantasy (and as my family knows, if there are too many characters in books and films I can get hopelessly lost) there is still much to be enjoyed in her writing.
Who can resist a line like this about one of the baddies in The Neverfear, the owner of a ship called the Fair Warning — “Vigo Nex; a man with a diamond set into his tooth and morals so lose they flapped when he walked?”
Or this, about the heroine Anya (the former Princess of Dousha) who “had the mouth of someone always ready to laugh or to fight”.
Rundell never talks down to her readers, in this book grabbing them at the outset with a mesmerising and unflinching account of the birth of a unicorn.
Later, we set off for a whirlwind of adventures aboard The Neverfear with our hero Christopher Forrester, a boy from London with a magical affinity with animals, Anya, Ratwin (the ratatoska) and Jacques (the Jaculus dragon) on a mission to recover treasures in order to save the kidnapped scholar Irian Guinne.
The setting is again the Gilouria Archipelago, unmapped islands where myriad magical creatures have lived for thousands of years.
As the advertising blurb says, Rundell has made sure to include everything to entice the most reluctant readers, among them jokes, peril, cliff-hangers, action, riddles, bad poetry, big questions of courage and love, and much about food, delicious and disgusting.
I found the pace and the sheer number of adventures overwhelming in this book, but I would not expect that to be the experience of fantasy aficionados.
My favourite of the series remains The Poisoned King where Anya and Christopher join forces to solve the problem of dying dragons and to seek justice for her father who has been falsely accused of her grandfather’s murder.
Elspeth McLean is an Otago Daily Times columnist