Cornelia Funke, Inkspell
Chicken House £12.99 10+
Even if books are your drug of choice, a book about
books can be very annoying. The last thing we want
to be reminded of when deep in a story is that it is
a story, conjured out of words. Yet the best kind of
magical tale shares this knowledge implicitly, with
wizards and witches able to command special powers
through the use of the right words. It seems extraordinary,
therefore, that nobody before Cornelia Funke came up
with the idea that a particularly gifted reader could
read the fictional into the real. That is what happened
in Inkheart. A gentle bookbinder, Mo, is heartbroken
because his voice sent his wife Resa into the world
of the story, leaving his daughter Meggie motherless.
Despite the attempts of a band of murderous villains
brought from Inkworld, they finally got Resa back,
voiceless but happy.
“
Stories always go on,” Mo tells Meggie, warningly. “They
don’t end on the last page, any more than they
begin on the first page.” Funke herself claims
not to have planned a sequel to Inkheart, but the
whopping 675 pages of Inkspell form the second part
of a trilogy. Dustfinger, the scar-faced fire-eater
exiled from his world into ours, finds a way back,
and is swiftly followed by Farid, the boy from 1001
Nights and Meggie, in love with Farid. They in turn
are followed by Mo and Resa. It is now, in a magical
world of ghosts, fairies, White Women and fires that
the story leaps into life as much more than a homage
to the kind of children’s book Funke adores.
Fenoglio the “author” who disappeared into his own story at the end of Inkheart keeps finding his tale has taken a turn for the worse, with good people dying and bad ones gaining increasing power. Meggie’s reading powers must not only save her father from a mortal bullet wound but bring back Cosimo the Fair from the dead to fight the evil Adderhead. Not only does Fenoglio go through agonies finding exactly the right words, but events conspire to leave part of them unspoken.
Having used Mo’s physical characteristics to create Bluejay the mysterious hero, he finds to his horror that poor Mo is about to be executed as the Adderhead’s enemy. Yes, there are worse things than British libel laws in this world, whose hypnotic beauties are underscored by gorgeous terrors – and another “diabolical storyteller” who is bent on giving Fenoglio’s original tale new twists and turns. You can sense Funke enjoying herself hugely in what has, against expectations, become her best work to date.
There are many other characteristics which make her remarkable, however. One is her feeling that adults and children are in an adventure together. I particularly love the relationship between Mo and Meggie, for if the bond between mothers and daughters or fathers and sons is frequently explored, that between fathers and daughters is rare.
For all that, Inkspell isn’t a novel to recommend to every child. It is a novel of complex ideas, for a reader who is already in love with literature. To those for whom a good children’s book is the greatest pleasure imaginable, this is the perfect gift.
Also enjoy:
Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, Charlie Cook’s
Favourite Book. Each character enjoys a different story
in which the next character appears. A vicious circle
for tots that will excite shrieks of glee. 3+
Allan & Janet Ahlberg, It Was a Dark and Stormy
Night. Can a kidnapped boy scare brigands with their
own tale? 5+
Philip Pullman, Clockwork. A thrilling masterwork on
stories that become real, when “all wound up”.
7+
The Times, December 2005