59 pages • 1 hour read
Katherine RundellImpossible Creatures
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Importance of Friendship and Love
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, child death, and animal death.
As Mal and Christopher meet and find new companions to join their cause, Rundell makes it clear that friendship and love are powerful sources of strength, and it is only with the support of their allies that the two protagonists find a way to navigate the dangers of the Archipelago and overcome challenges that would be impossible to confront alone. Mal and Christopher’s unlikely friendship also emphasizes the idea that deep bonds have the power to transcend worlds. Whereas Mal is an orphan who was born in a fantastical world and has a great deal of freedom, Christopher was raised in the real-world setting of Scotland and finds himself deeply restricted by his father’s overprotectiveness. The friendship therefore provides both children with crucial elements that were missing from their lives; Christopher discovers a world of adventure that tests him and remakes him into someone who can competently face dramatic challenges. On the other hand, Mal is a solitary girl whose differences from others tend to isolate her, and in Christopher, she finds a friend who refuses to allow her to pursue her quest alone and unsupported. His presence therefore becomes part of the bedrock of love and support that empowers her to defeat Francesco Sforza and save the Archipelago from destruction.
Even the novel’s secondary characters demonstrate important aspects of friendship and love, showing that these bonds allow people to bridge great personal differences. For example, Fidens Nighthand, a gruff smuggler whose life lacks purpose, finds a new path in life when he encounters Mal and discovers that she is the Immortal. His loyal friendship with Mal compels him to risk death multiple times to save her; he protects her from the karkadanns and willingly takes a wound that nearly kills him, and he also protects her from harm as Adam Kavil pursues her. While Mal benefits from Nighthand’s friendship and love, he also gains a new degree of depth and emotional maturity, for his association with Mal allows him to pursue a more meaningful life.
Notably, Rundell creates a world in which friendship and love can also transcend the differences between species. In the very beginning of the novel, when Gelifen slips through the portal, Mal’s bond with the griffin compels her to breach the space between the Archipelago and Christopher’s world. Her pursuit of Gelifen serves as the inciting incident that sets Mal’s quest in motion and leads her to save both the Archipelago and Christopher’s world. Gelifen also serves as a source of love and support for Mal in the lonely days of her early girlhood, when most other people view her as too strange to approach. Even in death, Gelifen has an influence on Mal’s actions, motivating her to embrace her role as the Immortal and complete her quest in the maze.
Through these and other relationships, Rundell suggests that true friendship requires a deep measure of loyalty, self-sacrifice, and a willingness to deal in hard truths when necessary. As a contrast to this idealized form of friendship, Rundell offers the example of the flawed, transactional relationship between Anja Trevasse and Nighthand; Anja’s treachery shows what can happen when a supposed friendship lacks the key traits that sustain healthy, honest interactions. In Anja’s case, her betrayal nearly causes the death of Nighthand and the destruction of the Archipelago itself. Although she tries to make amends to Nighthand by taking him to the centauride for healing, her greed and prioritization of her own needs over Nighthand’s is the catalyst that causes his near-death experience in the first place.
The Corrupting Influence of Power
The ability of power to corrupt proves to be the cause of much of the heartache and violence in the novel, and nowhere is this dynamic more apparent than in the contest between Francesco Sforza and those who act to save the Archipelago. Within the deepest recesses of his mind, Sforza is ironically dominated by his fear of being dominated by others, and this obsession leads him to seek a magical form of omnipotence by devouring all the glimourie in the Archipelago and the world in general. His ever-expanding desire for glimourie gives rise to a corrosive greed that leads him to engage in immoral acts like ordering the assassination of Mal, a child. The corruption that comes from his power over the Glimourie Tree is contagious and soon corrupts others who prove vulnerable to its influence. Adam Kavil, for example, willingly kills Leonor and pursues Mal because he, too, wants to avoid being dominated again. His lust for some form of personal power causes him to disregard basic tenets of ethical behavior, and he pursues his murderous goal despite his awareness that there is something profoundly wrong in killing a child.
The corruptive influence of power also manifests in lesser ways that nonetheless cause great distress for Mal and her companions, and Rundell uses key secondary characters to illustrate the subtler forms of corruption that can occur at higher levels of society. The powerful Anja, for example, acts in her own interests rather than remaining true to her friendship with Nighthand. Her treachery arises from her selfish desire to keep her dark family secrets hidden and maintain her social status. She is well aware that she owes her current position to the fact that her great-grandfather killed his partner to solidify the power of his own family. True to her family’s dark origins, Anja herself commits morally reprehensible acts due to her intense desire for power, which degrades her ability to engage in moral reasoning. Anja’s ability to think through an ethical lens becomes so compromised that even when she is confronted with the consequences of her greed and disloyalty—a nearly dead Nighthand and Mal’s disastrous encounters with Kavil—she still tries to justify her actions. As she tells Mal, “These are nuanced questions, far beyond your comprehension! My social position, my financial security” (216). Her words indicate that her overriding need to preserve her own social status has rendered her incapable of acknowledging the full extent of her own misdeeds.
Ultimately, Rundell presents the corruptive influence of power as a force that one can either accept or resist. Ironically, Mal herself recoils from the unethical uses of power that characters like Anja and Sforza demonstrate, but by the end of the novel, she becomes one of the most powerful characters because she holds the full, collective knowledge of humanity. However, rather than using this power to accrue even more power, she engages in self-sacrifice by flying Sforza into the Somnulum, thereby ending the existential threat against the Archipelago. Her exercise of power is therefore driven by something she loves more than power—the preservation of the natural world.
The Value of the Natural World
Although Rundell imbues her world with fantastical flourishes, it also functions on fundamental environmental principles such as balance and the responsible allocation of finite resources. This premise also compels her to create a world that is quite different than the alternate fantasy worlds that populate classic literature, for rather than remaining separate from the “real world” that Christopher inhabits, the Archipelago is intrinsically linked to it, and what happens to one world will inevitably affect the other. Thus, Rundell envisions these two worlds and the link between them as an interconnected whole. By portraying Christopher’s sense of wonder in the natural world and Mal’s dedication to safeguarding the fantastical animals that surround her, Rundell conveys the powerful argument that humans have a responsibility to preserve the integrity of the natural world.
The natural world of the Archipelago is a magical one that is designed to protect the various mythical creatures that have been hunted nearly to extinction by humanity in eons past. This setting therefore acts as a sanctuary in which diverse species thrive in special habitats. A prime example can be seen in the island of the sphinxes, where the history of the natural world and the creatures that live in it survive in written form, carved into the mountains themselves. Rundell also uses the concept of the glimourie—the magical force that permeates all life in the Archipelago and in Christopher’s world—to show the interconnectedness of all life forms.
Against this backdrop of environmentalism, Sforza stands as an avatar of humanity’s potential to cause ruinous destruction, for in his goal to consume an outsized proportion of glimourie (an essential, finite resource), he unbalances the very fabric of existence. The damage that he does soon appears throughout all of the Archipelago, but only observant people like Mal, who are closely connected to the natural world, are able to perceive the widespread damage that Sforza inflicts upon the world. By contrast, the governing body that is officially tasked with protecting the natural world—the Azurial Senate—fails to do its job even when its members are confronted with clear evidence that the glimourie itself is threatened. In many ways, the plot of Impossible Creatures therefore becomes an allegory and a cautionary tale that directly relates to the current confluence of environmental crises threatening the real world. By creating an alternate world that is linked to reality, Rundell uses entities like the Azurial Senate to deliver a pointed critique against the cumbersome bureaucracies that stand in the way of implementing environmental protections.
Despite the bleak outlook of this message, Rundell also uses Christopher’s perspective to inject a note of hope into the narrative, demonstrating that humans can embrace a healthier, more balanced way of interacting with the natural world. Christopher is a guardian of the waybetween that links his world to the Archipelago, and he is destined to become a steward of the connection between humans, the magical world, and the natural world. As Christopher gains greater familiarity with the fantastical elements of the Archipelago, Rundell conveys his sense of wonder and awe as he encounters the last surviving griffin, beholds herds of unicorns, and encounters a dragon the size of a castle. These scenes allow the author to show that the natural world holds many unforeseen wonders and is worth preserving.
As a counterpoint to Christopher and Mal’s deep respect for the natural world, the novel also introduces an array of antagonists who demonstrate what happens when people fail to assume a sense of personal and communal responsibility for protecting the natural world. For example, Sforza has diminished the glimourie so much that griffins like Gelifen can no longer survive in the Archipelago. Likewise, Adam Kavil kills Gelifen outright, destroying the very last specimen of the griffin species. By dramatizing Gelifen’s wounding and death, Rundell shows that destroying the uniqueness of the natural world is just as intense an act of violence as murdering a sentient being. Thus, the entire premise of the novel is designed to stress the fundamental importance of the natural world, suggesting that if people can appreciate it with a sense of awe and wonder, then they will take personal responsibility for protecting it from existential threats.
