Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

The protagonist of this story is a twelve-year-old bookworm named Meggie. Her father, Mo, is a bookbinder. Or, like Meggie likes to call him, a book doctor – he makes old books well again, after all. Meggie’s life changes when one night her father receives a visit from an odd man who calls himself Dustfinger and addresses Mo as Silvertongue. The very next morning marks the beginning of an adventure that involves her eccentric great-aunt Elinor and her fantastic library, the mystery behind the disappearance of her mother nine years before, and a very important book by the name of Inkheart.

Where to begin? There’s so much I want to say about Inkheart. This is undoubtedly a book for book lovers, and I had a lot of fun with it. So I hesitate between explaining why first and leaving the “however” for the end, or just getting it over it and then going on about the many things Inkheart has going for it.

I think I’ll start with the good: Inkheart is a story about (and for) book lovers, and it’s filled with a deep appreciation of not only storytelling, but also of books as physical objects – their texture, their smell, their shape, the way they feel in our hands, the way they fill our houses until we trip over them wherever we turn. I think this kind of appreciation (or indeed obsession) is something most of us can relate to.

The whole book, particularly the first few chapters, if full of passages about the reading life that made me smile, nod understandingly, or both. Take this, for example:

He was probably right, but there was another reason why Meggie took her books whenever they went away. They were her home when she was somewhere strange – familiar voices, friends that never quarrelled with her, clever, powerful friends, daring and knowledgeable, tried and tested adventurers who had travelled far and wide. Her friends cheered her up when she was sad, and kept her from being bored when Mo cut leather and fabric to the right size, and re-stitched old pages that over countless years had grown fragile from many fingers leafing through them.

Meggie herself is a very likeable heroine (though I did feel we never truly get to know her beyond her love of books, but more on that later), and the plot, or rather the premise, is for me the book’s greatest strength. I don’t think this is exactly a spoiler, as it’s revealed relatively early in the book, and plus pretty much everyone must know it by now. Basically, in Inkheart we have book characters walking out of the pages of their stories into our world. The main ones are from a fictional book, but we do get to see Tinker Bell from Peter Pan, a boy named Fadir from one of the stories in the Arabian Nights, and we escape an encounter with Long John Silver from Treasure Island.

I loved the fact that Inkheart is full of nods to other books. In fact, each chapter begins with a quote from another story, and these include The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, The Princess Bride, The Neverending Story, The Wind in the Willows, Watership Down, and many others. Cornelia Funke is clearly aware of the storytelling tradition she is now a part of, and she pays tribute to it.

So as a bookworm, and particularly as a great lover of children’s literature, how could I not enjoy Inkheart? And I did, I honestly did, but unfortunately I didn’t love it. And I really wanted to. The reason? Well, I find myself agreeing with Eva and Susan: I thought that the characters lacked a certain depth. The "bad guys" in particular, but the same could be said about the good characters to a lesser extent. Like I said, I felt that we never truly got to know Meggie, or Mo. I’m sure that there’s more to them than what was revealed in this book, and maybe we get to see it in the rest of the series. But not in this book.

As for the villains, I found Capricorn and company too…cartoonish for my taste. I guess it makes sense that they’d behave like storybook villains because, well, that’s exactly what they are, but even in stories, even in children’s stories, I like my villains to be a little more complex than that. They were too obvious, their motivations were too simplistic, and that kept them from actually ever feeling menacing. They were too predictable to be truly scary. The funny thing is that I got the impression that even the rest of the characters didn’t really take them seriously. We are told that they are scared of them, but they don’t behave as if they really are. For example, after Mo and Meggie and Elinor escape from Capricorn’s village for the first time, Mo and Meggie stay at a hotel nearby and Elinor goes back home, knowing that Basta and the others know where she lives. How could they expect not to get caught again?

But enough complaining. And because I really did have a lot of fun with this book, let me end with something positive: I was happy that Inkheart has a proper ending even though it’s part of a series. Apparently Cornelia Funke originally meant it to be a stand-alone book, which is why it works perfectly as one. So yay for that. I do want to read the rest of the trilogy (even because Fyrefly says the other books are better) but I’m not sure when I'll get to it, so it was great not to be left with a cliffhanger.

A few more memorable passages:

‘Mo, I’m twelve!’ Why do grown-ups think it’s easier for children to bear secrets than the truth? Don’t they know about the horror stories we imagine to explain the secrets?

‘Perhaps things have changed after all. Perhaps there’s another, much larger story behind the printed one, a story that changes just as our own world does. And the letters on the page tell us only as much as we’d see peering through a keyhole. Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan; it always stays the same, but underneath there’s a whole world that goes on developing and changing like our own.'

Meggie tugged him along the corridor so impatiently that he stubbed his toe on a pile of books, which was hardly surprising. Stacks of books were piled high all over the house-not just arranged in neat rows on bookshelves, the way other people kept them, oh no! The books in Mo and Meggie's house were stacked under tables, on chairs, in the corners of the rooms. There were books in the kitchen and books in the lavatory. Books on the TV set and in the closet, small piles of books, tall piles of books, books thick and thin, books old and new. They welcomed Meggie to breakfast with invitingly opened pages; they kept boredom at bay when the weather was bad. And sometimes you just fell over them.

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