How wonderful would it be to read your favourite story to life? To bring the characters forth, into this world, with just the magic of your voice? In Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart, bookbinder Mortimer (Mo) Folchart has this very gift. He is called “Silvertongue” by the very characters he brings to life. Unfortunately, these characters are villains in their world and have not changed for the better in ours. The other drawback to Mo’s gift is that something or someone in this world must leave – a life exchanged for a life if you will.
Capricorn and his henchmen live in abandoned villages throughout Europe, wrecking havoc and filling people’s hearts with terror wherever they roam. Capricorn’s thirst for evil is never quenched, and so for nine years he has been searching for Mo, indeed from the very day Mo read him from the pages of Inkheart into the world as we know it. Capricorn’s one aim is to have Mo read his savage beast into being to fulfill Capricorn’s every dastardly desire.
Mo makes his living as a bookbinder, traveling throughout Europe giving new clothes to old books, with his twelve year old daughter Meggie in tow. His wife disappeared when Meggie was but three, into the very story Mo read Capricorn out of. Mo’s quest for the ensuing nine years has been to both avoid Capricorn’s clutches and to find a way to read his wife back out again. He fails at both, and soon both he and Meggie become Capricorn’s prisoners, desperately trying to escape his clutches and find a way to send him back to his rightful story.
Funke’s book has an interesting premise, one that quickly captured my interest when I discovered it quite by chance, catching the movie version on TV. However, the book failed on many counts for me. First, it was very slow moving. Inkheart is the first in a trilogy, telling Mo and Meggie’s fantastical story and it failed to grasp my interest. I struggled to make my way through the book, never quite able to decide if I liked the book or not. I’m still not sure. When it did finally pick up, in the latter hundred pages or so, I was still left with some dissatisfaction, namely that Meggie, though twelve years old in the novel, reads like a much younger character, and this left a discordant note to the story, one I struggled to get past. Also, the book is set in modern day, complete with cell phones, yet reads more like a classical fantasy novel akin to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, with its talk of fairies, trolls and mystical beings such that every time a cell phone was mentioned I was jarred back out of a story I had worked so hard to get into. There in again lies the problem – a reader should not have to work so hard to immerse oneself in a story, but should fall in with ease, meeting up with characters who are as comforting as old friends. Inkheart unfortunately left me cold and struggling to maintain interest in the story.
Till next time, L is looking for a better book to read...
Cheers! :)
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