Inkheart

Inkheart has been published simultaneously in the UK, US and the author’s native Germany after The Thief Lord did so well in the US bestseller lists. It’s the first of a trilogy and film rights have already been sold. Funke has arrayed a fine cast of characters to strive for that next fantasy bestseller slot and like Philip Pullman she has taken great literary themes and attempted to convey their pros and cons to her young audience – a love of books, the role of author, the role of literacy and imagination in civilisation, how evil is created and breeds violence. A character called ‘Silvertongue’ and a tame marten also give the impression she is more indebted to Pullman than she would perhaps like to admit but the story overall is more raw and less satisfying than ‘His Dark Materials’.

Twelve-year-old Meggie and her father Mo live quietly together in the country after her mother disappeared when she was three. Mo is a bookbinder, an occupation evocatively described with an obvious love for books. This love becomes central to the themes and plot once we are introduced to Meggie’s great aunt Elinor, who has whole libraries of collectable books, and to Mo’s special gift of being able to make storybook characters step out of the print and paper and become alive. Meggie and Mo experience a stressful, frightening summer when the evil character Capricorn whom Mo inadvertently let loose from the pages of an Italian fantasy novel called ‘Inkheart’, takes them prisoner, burning Elinor’s precious books along the way and threatening death at every turn. His henchmen, the Black Jackets, cannot read and are thus portrayed as ignorant and bad, whipping out knives and guns to threaten Mo, Elinor and Meggie. Thankfully Mo and the author of ‘Inkheart’, Fenoglio, come up with a solution at the end and good conquers evil for the time being, with the added bonus that Meggie’s mother returns from the pages of a book.

Funke’s novel has some mixed messages for children about the power of books and the role of author in fiction which could do with further discussion. She attempts to open up wider literary horizons to today’s children with pertinent quotations from different books prefacing each chapter while characters from Treasure Island, Peter Pan and Hans Christian Andersen come alive as they are read aloud out of books, but she has not dared to incorporate more modern books into her fantasy. Meggie and Mo see authors erroneously as ‘dead or very, very old’, which is out of touch with the current cult of celebrity authors in the UK and US, but may not jar in Germany. Funke also has a mixed attitude to Fenoglio and his creation of the original ‘Inkheart’ – she treats him with some contempt through Meggie’s eyes, as he does not understand the magnitude of his characters coming alive, but ends in a twee way with fairies and gnomes from his novel populating Aunt Elinor’s house.