ABSTRACT
While death, as we have seen in earlier chapters, is a major theme of many of the crossover novels published in the millennial decade, it seems that many adult readers in the same period have turned to children’s fi ction, on the contrary, to discover (or rediscover) a sense of the energy and potential embedded in the beginnings of life and art. In children’s fi ction, adult readers are seeking to recover the earliest memories of childhood, the perceived roots of language and culture, and narrative in its allegedly most archaic and primitive forms. Th is search for roots can be interpreted as a resistant response to the disorienting aspects of contemporary life: accelerations of time, collapse of space, rapid developments in technology, and so on. Moreover, in a decade which has witnessed spectacular and repeated collisions between religious fundamentalism and modern secularism, children’s fi ction has emerged as a signifi cant arena in which to explore the roots of the religious and/or spiritual instinct in the individual psyche. In this chapter, I would like to make a case for one particular novel’s excellence in probing these related concerns. David Almond’s Clay tells the story of two boys who combine their imaginative powers to create a living monster out of clay.1 Set in Felling-upon-Tyne in the 1960s, the place and date of Almond’s own childhood, and drawing on the Frankenstein and golem legends as well as the Genesis story, in which Adam and Eve are fashioned out of the dust of the earth, the novel raises questions about where the human instinct to create comes from, whether the instinct to destroy is equally inherent in us, and whether there are or should be limits to creative aspiration.2
