Inkheart

Dr. Roger Lundin, my professor of American literature at Wheaton College, could have gone the whole semester without teaching us, and his class would still have been one of my favorites. He could have stood at his lectern and read from William Bradford's journal every period, and we would have been mesmerized. He could have read James Fenimore Cooper, the wordiest of writers, and we would have been mesmerized. He had an amazing gift. He could read and make you feel like you were in the book. Twenty five years later I still distinctly hear his voice saying the word "beans," and it brings back the wonder of Walden. Cornelia Funke celebrates this wonderful gift in Inkheart.

The most compelling passages in the book describe Mo reading aloud: "So Mo began filling the silence with words. He lured them out of the pages as if they had only been waiting for his voice, words long and short, words sharp and soft, cooing, purring words. They danced through the room, painting stained-glass pictures, tickling the skin."

Funke takes that figurative idea of making things come to life and makes it literal. Whenever Mo reads aloud, something or someone comes out of the book. What a great plot idea! Mo's daughter Meggie has never heard him read aloud though because there is a catch. Whenever someone comes out of the book, someone goes in. Though Meggie doesn't know it at the start of the book, this is why her mother is gone.

The conundrum of people going in and out of books begs the characters in Inkheart to compare the worlds of fiction to the world we live in. Wondering how she can rescue Mo and Meggie from thugs that have come out of Inkheart, the book within the book, Aunt Elinore ruminates, "The world was a terrible place, cruel, pitiless, dark as a bad dream. Not a good place to live in. Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness--and love. . . . Love, truth, beauty, wisdom, and consolation against death." While he considers Elinore naive because he has experienced the terrors within Inkheart, Dustfinger, a firebreather who was pulled out of the book, desperately wants to get back into it even as he guesses that he will come to a bad end there. He finds our world cluttered with noise and only feels comfortable at night.

The plot of Inkheart is incredibly creative and the characters are compelling, but it isn't told that well. Nothing makes me angrier than when an author witholds information from the reader in order to purposefully misguide him. It is not until pg. 395, well after we first heard about a maiden named Resa who is serving the villain Capricorn, that Funke "dramatically" tells us Meggie's mother's name in the blunt, clunky line "Teresa was her mother's name." She could have easily mentioned Teresa's name earlier in the book and let the reader put it together, even if Meggie didn't. Likewise, we are told even later than this that Dustfinger is in love with her. Also, the scenes in the book tend to meander. The writing is not as taut as, say, J. K. Rowling's is in the Harry Potter series. For instance, Capricorn hangs Resa and Dustfinger in nets for a while (which seems like it would be difficult to do in a chapel), but then sends them down to the crypt supposedly because anyone who is executed has to spend time in the crypt. How is that a reason for moving them, and why were they in the nets to begin with? Motivations are often unclear or made clear too late.

You have to read Inkheart for the beauty of the whole story rather than looking at each part too closely, but I still recommend it highly, and my daughter tells me that its sequel, Inkspell, is even better. I'm still wondering about whom I would read out of a book if I could--maybe Innocent Smith from Chesterton's Manalive or Rebecca from Scott's Ivanhoe. Better yet, what book would I like to be read into--maybe somewhere fun like The Importance of Being Ernest or a magical place like Peter Pan.