The Daily Telegraph - Features
The Knights of Camelot, nice guys? Think again
Children’s books The Untameables by Clare Pollard
160pp, Emma Press, T £9.99 (0808 196 6794), ebook £5.49 ★★★★★
Clare Pollard is well known for her five volumes of poetry. But in recent years, her most intriguing work has been her literary criticism, such as Fierce Bad Rabbits (2019), in which she invited us to rethink the stories we read as children. How did so many of us miss the Orwellian horror in Roger Hargreaves’s Mr Men books, in which Mr Neat and Mr Tidy forcibly bathe Mr Messy until he is transformed into a faceless blob?
This most exacting of readers has now written a children’s book of her own, inspired by the Arthurian myths, for readers of eight-plus. “Welcome to Camelot, the home of King Arthur,” begins The Untameables. “This is a land where there is still enchantment.” But Pollard entreats the reader to question how the legends came to be. “Perhaps you’re thinking: hang on, I thought those Knights of the Round Table were nice guys!… But history is written by the powerful, who can never resist tweaking it.”
So, in Pollard’s version, the stories are retold from the perspective of a timid 10-year-old servant, Roan. As the Knights wage wars and slaughter magical fauna, the ordinary people are suffering from a mysterious illness. Can Roan (and his friend Elva) find the Holy Grail, and restore health to the kingdom?
Folklore has been a frequent theme in Pollard’s poetry, and she writes with the precision of someone at home in her milieu. “Wyverns are small members of the dragon family that breathe frost instead of fire,” is typical of the sort of explanation slipped into The Untameables. The plot moves briskly, and the chatty prose will find much appeal with younger readers. As for older ones, Pollard takes us back to our childhood and – as with those Mr Men books – makes us think it all out again.