INKHEART
By Cornelia Funke
Chicken House, £12.99; 544pp
ISBN 1 904 44209 9
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Meggie’s father, Mo, a revered bookbinder, has a magical power that many readers would envy. When he reads aloud he makes characters step out of their “world” and into ours. Who wouldn’t love to be able to summon up Gandalf, Mary Lennox or Ron Weasley? Seven years ago, when Meggie was three, Mo was reading a story called Inkheart. Not only did three evil men appear in our world, but Meggie’s mother disappeared, along with two cats. Surrounded and befriended by books, Meggie has never discovered the truth of her mother’s prolonged absence — until one of the characters, the cowardly, scarred, fire-eating Dustfinger, turns up on their doorstep.

Metafiction, or stories about stories, was supposedly discovered in the 1980s. Yet all the techniques writers such as Salman Rushdie, John Fowles and A. S. Byatt were playing with had been discovered decades ago by E. Nesbit, Tolkien and indeed Scheherazade herself. If you love stories you become fascinated by how they are made, and at what cost. The kind of clever child who moves from Where the Wild Things Are to The Phantom Tollbooth is the kind who will thrill to the real and metaphysical adventures of Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart.

For Mo has the last remaining copy of Inkheart, and the evil Capricorn and Basta, determined to stay in our world, want to destroy every copy so that they can’t be sent back.

Before you can say arson, kidnap and murder, it’s up to Meggie and her eccentric bibliophile aunt Elinor to rescue Mo from a village in northern Italy, where bandits swarm and the police are impotent. Luckily for them, Dustfinger turns out to be yearning to go back to the fairy world — the world that Maggie’s mother loved reading about, but where she is now at risk. Meggie, too, is an omnivorous reader, and even when fleeing for her life can’t bear to travel without a box of ten particular stories.

Whether a child who is not already steeped in books would get so much out of it is questionable. The story has a long, quirky fuse before its scintillating climax, and there are longueurs where the story seems more like a boardgame than an adventure. As in her previous book, The Thief Lord, Funke is wonderful at making her adult characters as sympathetic and believable as her children, but the price for this is that the love between Mo and his lost wife, and the passion everyone feels about books, tends to blot out the child you should care about.

You can’t help feeling that the author is spending too much energy yearning to take her place up there with the writers she so admires — and that Inkheart, though the most original children’s novel to be published this year, does not quite merit a place in its own pantheon.

Read on

• Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Book? by Lauren Child (4+)
  
• The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster (8+)
  
• The Enchanted Castle by E. Nesbit (9+)
  
• There’s a Lion in the Meadow by Margaret Mahy (3+)
  
• A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (9+)

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