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
