INKHEART, INSPELL, THE THIEF LORD
by Cornelia Funke
Chicken House, £6.99 ea; (Inkspell, June 5)

CORNELIA FUNKE IS SO CLOSE to being the German J. K. Rowling that it would be easy to envy her. A former social worker whose gilt-blonde beauty is pure Rhinemaiden, her stories began to be published in Britain only when Barry Cunningham, the editor who discovered Harry Potter, picked them up four years ago.

Every one has topped the New York Times bestseller list. The Thief Lord, about two orphans who join a gang of Venetian child thieves, is now a star-studded film out this month. The first part of her Inkspell trilogy is being filmed by New Line, makers of The Lord of The Rings.

Funke lives in Faye Dunaway’s old house in Beverly Hills. Her fairytale success, however, has met real tragedy. Her husband Rolf, the father of their two children, died of cancer a few months ago, a year into their idyllic new life in California. Having written so poignantly about loss, pain and grief, she is managing bereavement with tremendous dignity.

“The difference between writing for children and writing for adults is that with children, you always have to have hope. You can’t let hope go,” she says, in perfect, slightly accented English. “My present situation, in which my children have lost their father and I have lost my partner, the person I spent 25 years with, 24 hours a day, is probably one I will never get used to. He inspired me creatively, he was my collaborator and my first reader. His influence is everywhere.

“We can only deal with sad times because we had such good times. He died without pain, which was a blessing, and he was not afraid. It’s like Goethe says, the gods give everything to their beloved, the great grief and the great joy.”

Funke’s intense seriousness, shot through with quicksilver humour (her name means “spark”), represents a distinctively German sensibility that has almost been forgotten on these shores. It taps into all that is wonderful about Grimm’s fairytales — the vigour, the quirkiness, the instinctive sense of mystery — while recoiling from their racism and cruelty. In English children’s classics children lose their parents as quickly as possible, but Funke’s novels often include parents as protagonists. Mo, Meggie’s father in Inkspell, shares her adventure and magical power.

Funke became the breadwinner, writing and illustrating 40 books while Rolf, a former printer, took care of the children. Like Philip Pullman, Funke understands that children are intrigued by the power of the adult world: in The Thief Lord, a child chooses to become an adult on a magic roundabout that can speed up or reverse age. Her family was book-obsessed, and her father, a lawyer, took her to the library in Westphalia every week. She read her way through everything and discovered English authors. (Her favourite children’s novel is T. H. White's The Once and Future King, followed by Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.) “I still remember the first moment when Lucy opened the wardrobe to Narnia, and I thought, I have all those wardrobes of my own. I became a carpenter of wardrobes,” she says with a touch of mischief. Writing the second book of the Inkheart trilogy turned her into a “mad woman scribbling at night, in the cab, on my travels. I opened a door and all these characters ran out.”

Inkheart, and its sequel, Inkspell (the third part of the trilogy is forthcoming), use a simple but wonderful premise: what if a reader could actually read themselves into a story? Mo and Meggie share the gift of being able to make people from our world disappear into the world of Inkspell, and make people from Inkspell appear in our world. Exploring the gift of storytelling, it abounds in wonderful metaphors and dramatisations of creativity. Funke succeeded in getting Inkheart filmed partly because she based Mo on Brendan Fraser, the star of The Mummy, and sent him a copy. His interest in playing Mo developed into friendship, and helped to get the film commissioned.

“I wrote Brendan into my life,” she says, smiling. “He said how strange it was to find somebody on the other side of the planet who knew him so well.”

She views the renaissance in children’s literature as “a really large bloom, an exceptional situation, which it is very nice to be part of”, and remains aware how rare it is for authors to be successful in more than one country — Pullman is almost unknown in Germany and the successful US authors Kate di Camillo and Jerry Spinelli are unknown here.

Her new life in California is paid for by sales long before the film money came, and although she is grateful for the support of new friends there, she clearly lives, to an exceptional degree, inside books, language and her own creative world.

“Germans don’t write fantasy,” she says. “I think in a way we are a little scared of our own tradition because we had the Fascists grab so many myths. I hope that the new generation will be able to grab them back and feel free to use them again — in a responsible way.”

The Thief Lord opens on May 26

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