historical sense – but in this alternate Victorian landscape, Golding is also able to put an Aboriginal character, Mr Billibellary, in charge (he is so devoted to his creatures’ freedom that he is satirically described as ‘a let-looser’, rather than a keeper.) The cast of characters is diverse throughout – the book’s other protagonist, Henri Volp,


for instance, is an Algerian scholar,


pioneering the forensic science of fingerprints – and the place itself remains unnamed. ‘I wanted to make clear that science doesn’t just belong to the Western tradition…and I wanted someone to be reading the book in America or France and to be thinking it could be happening in their country. I wanted that feeling of a little city- state, that could be anywhere, so I deliberately went for quite an international flavour, making it feel it didn’t belong to any particular history of any particular country, but was actually the history of science.’ Ill-feeling runs high within the closed world of the museum, however,


with phrenologists defending dubious observations,


students competing for kudos and resources, and despised maids, denied formal education, picking up furtive scraps of information. But when a murderer strikes, Henri the scholar and Ree, stonemason turned skivvy, must pool their skills and knowledge to solve the mystery – discovering more about the museum’s secrets than they could ever have imagined in the process. Hidden renegades, the complex balance of faith and science, the necessity of the scientific method and the dangers of attachment to debunked theories all run through this thought-provoking, quick-paced crime-and-creatures caper, enticing its readers to explore the museum island in their own minds. The Curious Science Quests series, meanwhile, came about very differently. ‘Normally, when I write a book, I just think of an idea and then get on with it.’ This time, however, Golding was asked to adapt The Penultimate Curiosity, a book for adults dealing with enquiry, science and philosophy, by Andrew Briggs, professor of nanomaterials, and artist and poet Roger Wagner, both of whom are friends of Golding’s. ‘They said, could you turn this into a book for kids? And I said I can’t do one book – there’s too much here. So I suggested slicing it up into six parts, and then I came up with the idea of how to do it – with time travel.’ The series’ protagonists are Harriet, a tortoise collected by Charles Darwin and brought home to England in his suitcase, and Milton, a cat belonging to Erwin Schrödinger, a pleasingly unlikely duo who travel through time to witness moments of significant scientific discovery. Impressive figures have provided


input: ‘When I first started working on it, and I did a sample text to show – some pages about the possibility of time-travel – I sent them off to Andrew, thinking he was going to check it. But no - about two weeks later, he said “I’ve showed what you wrote to the Astronomer Royal, Lord Rees, and he’s given you this feedback.” And then a week later I got another email, saying “I was at a conference in Cambridge, and I showed what you’d done to Stephen Hawking, and here’s his feedback!” So I got a short paragraph of feedback about the paradoxes of time travel from Stephen Hawking - and I thought, well, that’s it, my career has peaked!’ The series is humorous, light-touch and highly illustrated, with cartoon-style images by Brett Hudson and try-at-home experiments interspersed. It has some weighty points to make, too: ‘There’s a bit in the last book about how society needs to engage with science, because science is taking big decisions which affect all of us. We can destroy the world now, for instance. You can’t just disengage from science if you don’t understand it. As well as the fun and games and time travel, it has that running underneath.’ One of Golding’s major contributions was to put in women wherever possible, and to try and avoid the ‘history of dead white guys - which is a struggle. It is largely a history of dead white guys, because they’re the ones who got recorded.’ Nevertheless, she explains, ‘the word ‘scientist’ itself was coined by Mr Whewell in 1833, in order to include Mary Somerville…‘Scientist’ is a neutral word, and has been all the way through, since the beginning.’


The Curious Crime, Lion, 978-0745977874, £6.99 pbk The Curious Science Quest: Cave Discovery, Lion, 978- 0745977447, £6.99 pbk


The Curious Science Quest: Greek Adventure, Lion, 978- 0745977454, £6.99 pbk


The Curious Science Quest: Rocky Road to Galileo, Lion, 978-0745977522, £6.99 pbk


The Diamond of Drury Lane, Egmont, 978-1405285308, £6.99 pbk


Imogen Russell Williams is a journalist and editorial consultant specialising in children’s literature and YA.


Books for Keeps No.235 March 2019 9


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