Inkheart: When Books Come to Life

Yesterday I read Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart after going to see the movie over the weekend. I really enjoyed the movie and loved its book-loving characters and of course I loved the underlying message of the power of the written word. Great good comes from reading great books after all. And in Inkheart, both the book and the movie, the great good comes from understanding a brutal truth, that bad things happen to good people, and a moral truth, that the struggle to make things right is life’s purpose, not the actual making things right because things will never be all right. Tough truth and good lesson, especially tough and good given Funke’s audience of the post-child, pre-teen set.

Inkheart is a great adventure story about a man who can bring stories to life, literally bring the characters out of the book and into reality, and the repercussions that this talent (curse) has for his family and for the characters he reads out. But it is also a story of loving books and needing them, and an exploration of the relationship between readers and books, and between characters and authors. Most profoundly, it can be read as a treatise on the purpose of fiction. The purpose of fiction is to experience and understand reality.

Using fiction to understand reality may seem like a contradiction but it is a basic fact of good writing. Fiction lets us experience life safely (at least physically; mental derangement and rearrangement can be far-reaching and a good thing). Through reading we can experiment — risk-free — with different viewpoints and lifestyles, and we can come close to understanding certain states of fear, loathing, love, and desire without having to make the personal commitment or putting our bodies or souls on the line. Of course reading is also an escape but good books always offer us more than just escape: they offer us a new view at the world and we incorporate that view into what we already have seen, what we already know, and we become a bit wiser, hopefully a bit more compassionate and empathetic, possibly more committed to ideals of connection and communication.

But what if we have seen only a decade or so of life? How does Funke connect with her young readers? She takes a kid, our hero-child Meggie, and places that kid in difficult and even horrible situations. She gives Meggie very human feelings of cowardice and anguish and outrage and confusion, and she puts Meggie through hell and high water. The reader understands the kid and experiences what she experiences: the line between fact and fiction has blurred but it is still there as a protective barrier. And Funke’s book within a book (and both books have the same title) adds an extra shield of protection. Meggie, the child hero of the book, is witnessing very real horrors but within the context of a book come to life. So when she hears that the villains drove an old woman from her home, destroyed her possessions and left her “lifeless among her trampled garden beds”, Meggie experiences horror and grief and feels compassion and outrage. The reader feels the same way but is spared the real world where real bad things happen. And for a child, the real world of Darfur or Bosnia or the concentration camps, can be too much reality. Fiction allows the beginning of the sensitivity and compassion that will mature as adulthood sets in; fiction allows the reader to understand reality, and those doses will get stronger as the reader grows older.

Funke’s talent at genuine and rich story telling is immense. Her writing style is in service of her goal, to tell a good story; it is not beautiful or lyrical or evocative, it is straightforward and engaging. Her plot is clever and sure to resonate with anyone who has ever wanted to escape into a book; her characters are interesting and unique, flawed and human (even when they are evil); and her pacing is fast and exciting. She writes for children the same way Roald Dahl wrote, without condescension. She shares with her readers and never preaches. Best of all, she writes a great adventure book that meets her own stated goal (through the words of old aunt Elinor, who I believe is Funke’s alter-ego) of leaving her readers with “love, truth, beauty, wisdom, and consolation.”

I also want to note with gratitude Funke’s liberal use of quotations at the beginning of each chapter of he book. I am grateful on behalf of all the readers who will be led to read Roald Dahl, J.M. Barrie, Kipling (see my review of Captains Courageous), Richard Adams (see my review of Watership Down) , Tolkein, Ray Bradbury, T.H. White, and William Goldman. And I am grateful on behalf of myself and other parents for the quotation, copied below, offered from William Goldman’s A Princess Bride. It is difficult to teach our children that life is unfair. We have to teach them to expect but not at the same time not accept the rough knocks of life, to be hopeful and hard working, optimistic and dreamy, flexible and strong. Some parents turn to religion to teach that mix of faith and action. I prefer to use books, the lessons in books, books as mirrors of real life, with joys and frustration, sorrows and happiness, the tedium and the excitement, and the peace and the love, that is real life. Great good comes from reading great books. From The Princess Bride: “Life isn’t fair…We tell our children that it is but it’s a terrible thing to do. It’s not only a lie, it’s a cruel lie. Life is not fair, and it never has been, and it’s never going to be.” Some kids are good at math, some are good at baseball, some are not good at anything tangible but they are still good kids, because they are just kids and they can become open-minded, compassionate, interested and interesting adults. And books will help them get there. (Along with faith, games and sports, family dinners, downtime and playtime, studying hard and sleeping enough and eating good food).

NB: In the book, Elinor refers to the quotation of “love, truth, beauty, wisdom, and consolation” but is unable to remember who said the words. A little research led me to Anatole Broyard, the American literary critic, and his essay in the New York Times Book Review “On Lending Books.”