Myths

You wait ages for an intelligent, literate children’s book, then two come along at once. There’s Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field and Katherine Rundell’s The Poisoned King. Of the two, Rundell’s is easier on the wrist: 336 pages to Pullman’s 621. She is an accomplished writer, the author of a study of John Donne. A scholarly background is all to the good here, for she has a treasure chest of myths and stories to rummage in. Her Impossible Creatures series (of which The Poisoned King is the second) is based on an archipelago, Glimouria, which holds the endangered creatures of mythology. A map of the islands, in Tomislav Tomic’s illustration,

What happened to the condolence books? They swiftly multiplied, that mad week in September 1997. The original four at St James’s Palace had to be increased to more than 40. People queued for hours and often spent many minutes composing their contributions. That’s not even to mention the thousands of similar books organised by councils, embassies and private businesses. The official set were ‘offered’ to the Spencer family. Perhaps they are at Althorp. Edward White’s Dianaworld, about the phenomenon of the former Princess of Wales, shows an indefatigable resourcefulness. It is not really about the woman herself but about the effect she had on people who never laid eyes on

Mark Haddon’s latest collection of short stories, Dogs and Monsters, uses myth and history as springboards into mesmerising accounts of isolation, tragedy and, of course, dogs, which are a motif throughout, from the hounds who mistakenly tear apart their owner Actaeon, to one who befriends St Antony at his lowest point. Haddon monitors the borderlines between man and beast, divine and mortal, and what’s real and what isn’t. In ‘The Mother’s Story’, a reimagining of the Minotaur myth, the action is transported to quasi-medieval England. The first-person narrator is Pasiphae (though unnamed), whose ruthless husband has locked up her son Paul, born ‘a moon calf’. Horribly abused, Paul is transformed