Authorgraph No.235
A
buzzing bookshop café in Oxford feels like an appropriate place to discuss Julia Golding’s erudite, intriguing new books: The Curious Crime, an alternate history for middle-grade readers, and The Curious Science Quest, a younger series of time-travel adventures focused on the
history of science. Golding is best known for her Cat Royal books, set in eighteenth-century theatrical London (the first in the series, The Diamond of Drury Lane, won both the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and the Nestle Children’s Book Prize in 2006). She has ranged far and wide as a writer, however, writing books under different names, for different ages and set in very different periods – dark teen thrillers as Joss Stirling, Elizabethan historical fiction as Eve Edwards, and mythological creatures, Arthurian legends, Victorian butlers, Vikings and pirates as Julia Golding. Is there a quintessential element that always appears in her work?
‘Perhaps a certain gentleness,’ she says, quoting an early review – as well as a willingness to see things from the villain’s point of view. Golding is fond of her bad eggs, in fact, and likes to remind herself that ‘everyone is the hero of their own story’, providing her readers with nuanced, at least slightly sympathetic portraits of all her characters. Her own career has had a fascinating range – after reading English at Cambridge, she joined the Foreign Office, and took up diplomatic work in Poland. Returning to Britain, she studied for a doctorate in Romantic literature at Oxford before joining Oxfam as a lobbyist, though she now writes full time. As a child, her favourite books included Elizabeth Goudge’s ‘adorable fantasy’ The Little White Horse, and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and A Little Princess; especially the latter, in which Sara Crewe ‘creates a world out of her imagination, to make her own reality bearable.’ She enjoyed The Lord of the Rings, too, for its vision of ‘British countryside writ large’, the everyday made sublime. The rich, resonant sense of these fully-formed imaginary worlds is clear in her own work. In beginning a new story, Golding admits, she also looks for ‘complete worlds’ that she can build. The vast museum in which The Curious Crime is set is a prime example; a building both discrete and seemingly infinite, isolated by its island situation and fascinatingly rife with wandering wildlife and straying students. Part Gormenghast, part Hogwarts, part Holmesian mind palace, it’s the ideal setting both for a murder mystery and for walking the reader
Julia Golding Interviewed by
Imogen Russell Williams
gently through the history of science via its uncountable halls, exhibits and corridors. Golding chose to set the story in an alternate Victorian era partly because she felt the science of the period was well illustrated by a museum (unlike, say, general relativity and quantum mechanics). It’s also a period characterised by intense debates about women’s education, and she wanted to ask: what if the debate went backwards? ‘What if, when Darwin came up with his version of biological evolution, [some scientists] took it in an extreme way, and used it to justify existing biases in society?’ In The Curious Crime, which she describes as her own ‘thought experiment’,
societal
prejudice against women and people of different ethnicities has been justified by a dubious Darwinism taken to anti-religious extremes. To suggest belief in a creator of any kind is now anathema; to work as a mason, if you’re female, a monstrous transgression. In the first few pages, Golding’s heroine, Maria ‘Ree’ Altamira, does both. Defiant, tenacious, an accomplished stonemason with an excellent head for heights and an adored, indulged dodo companion, Ree is an instantly engaging protagonist. How much does Golding have in common with her heroine? ‘Well, I like doing things with my hands, but I haven’t actually had a go at stonemasonry. And I’m not bad at heights, but I probably wouldn’t offer to be a roofer in another life…’ The relationship between Ree and her dodo, Philoponus, however, is based on the bond between Golding and her cockapoo. (Philoponus’ name is a nod to the forgotten scientist who ran Galileo’s famous ‘falling bodies’ experiment, centuries before the Leaning Tower of Pisa was even built; Ree’s full name, meanwhile, is borrowed from Altamira, a site in Northern Spain where early cave drawings were discovered. ‘It was actually a little girl who was there with her father; she was really small, about seven or eight, and she crawled through a hole that he couldn’t get through, and came back and said: “Papa, there are oxen on the walls.”’) Golding allows Phil the dodo and other extraordinary creatures – a Tasmanian wolf, a Javan tiger, a python, a macaque – to roam throughout the museum partly just for the fun of it. ‘But, also, there is a serious point to be made there about extinction – I wanted to say these are gone, we’ve lost these creatures, and to remind the reader of their amazingness. All of the main animals, apart from the macaque, are extinct.’ As menageries were part of the scientific way of teaching, giving the museum dedicated zoological gardens makes
8 Books for Keeps No.235 March 2019
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