The Explorer by Katherine Rundell, Bloomsbury (2017)

This book is a fictional account of a journey in the Amazon jungle. This might seem a strange choice given that only four months and two books ago I discussed Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure which was an account of an actual journey in the Amazon jungle, but this book could hardly be more different: it is a children’s book, an adventure story about four children stranded in the Amazon when their plane crashes. I am not going to summarise the story, but the book received splendid reviews and won the Costa Children’s Book Award. It also has black and white illustrations throughout; one of the first examples of which, in a novel, was Stern’s Tristram Shandy in the 18th century. Here is one short extract:

‘At the Top of the Cliff’: A great cliff rose up from the jungle, covered in vines. It was fifty times as tall as Fred. The rock face could have been grey, but it was so covered in foliage that it seemed to rise from the earth like a growing thing, a great green extension of the jungle floor…

Fred shook a beetle off his eye and gripped another handful of vines. He hauled upwards. Slowly, inch by inch, the roots of trees growing down the rock came into clear sight, then the tip of the rock curved and became an incline with bushes, which became flat land. Fred let out a yell of triumph…

…But even as she spoke, the ground gave way.

It dropped suddenly down, smooth moss on smooth stone. She didn’t have time to stop and cascaded down it on her back, thumping against stones and roots. Fred launched himself after her, scrabbling to stay upright and grabbling at trees…

They tumbled into a heap at the bottom…They stood with their backs to a slope, at the edge of a vast expanse of stone. It was an enormous stone courtyard, as wide as a hayfield and at least four times long. The ground was built from white and yellow stone blocks, rough-hewn but smooth at the top, as from the passing of many thousands of feet. It was set in a slight dip in the ground, so the earth rose up from all sides, forming a natural wall. Down the middle of the great stone courtyard grew two rows of trees, creating a boulevard. There were heaps of stone in five or six places, as if small houses had lined each side.’

At the end of the book the author adds ‘A Note on Explorers’ in which she writes: ‘Although the explorer and the city in this book are fictional, both have roots in real life. Percy Fawcett, the man for whom our explorer goes looking, is real. Fawcett was an artillery officer with an astonishingly tough constitution and enough moustache for three men. He spent much of his life in search of what he called the City of Z, a city he imagined as richly sophisticated and peppered with gold.

In 1925 shortly after crossing the Upper Xingu, a south-eastern tributary river of the Amazon, he and his companions disappeared.

He was never heard from again. Dozens of explorers, like my fictional one went looking for him.’

This brings the similarity with Peter Fleming’s ‘Brazilian Adventure’ even closer as he was one of those searching for Percy Fawcett. Did Katherine Rundell read his book? There is no mention of it in her Acknowledgements, and her book was published in 2017, whereas Fleming’s book only appeared in a new edition in September 2023. So it seems likely that she, and her publishers, had never heard of it. She did go to Brazil herself but with a guide and describes the Amazon as ‘the most astonishing place I have ever seen.’

Quite apart from their books on Brazil, Katherine Rundell and Peter Fleming have another connection: they were both brilliant students-both gained Firsts at Oxford and went on to become professional writers. Katherine is also an All Souls prize-winner and as such is a Fellow of All Souls; it also gives her access to the roofs of the college where the photograph of her is taken. She enjoys tightrope walking as well as climbing across the rooftops of Oxford. Maybe All Souls hasn’t caught up with the invention of the ladder yet? And perhaps a visit to Brazil wasn’t so very difficult for someone whose early childhood was spent in Africa.

Photo of Katherine Rundell on roof of All Souls, Oxford by Andrew Crowley