Inkheart: an actual living novel

It happens to me entirely too often: absorbed in a book, I wish that its characters could live, or that I could live within its pages. In second grade, my favorite imaginary friends were the Happy Hollisters: Pete, Pam, Ricky, Holly, and Sue—a family of detectives who could out-sleuth Nancy Drew (although later I wanted to be her). In middle school, I was certain that I belonged inside the pages of a Louis L’Amour western; and in high school, I met some pretty spectacular dragons. I really wanted the dragons to be real. (Who am I kidding? I still want the dragons to be real.)

So this summer, in wanting to meet some more dragons, I borrowed Inkheart by Cornelia Funke. Sadly, the lizard on the red cover appears only once in a space of two sentences. It is not a book about dragons. It is a book about a book from which characters come alive and enter this world, and people from this world disappear into the book. Apparently, this occurs frequently when Mo reads aloud.

Unfortunately for all involved, the characters that appear here—and get stuck—are not the nice ones. Capricorn and his goons are the ones whose hearts are as black as ink and they wreak havoc on all around them, poor souls. The story reads like a chiding to people like me: “be careful what you wish for,” it whispers, “it might not be the nice dragons who appear.”

Inkheart isn’t all a warning, though. It reads more like a love letter from the author to books in general. In fact, I suspect she wrote it simply so that she could tout the wonders of the written and spoken word, and brag about how much she loves books. Throughout the story, books are treated as if they are necessary for breathing. The inability to read and the destruction of books are considered crimes of the highest offense.

Example—a quote from chapter two:
“’If you take a book with you on a journey,’ Mo had said when he put the first one in her box, ‘an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it… yes, books are like flypaper—memories cling to the printed page better than anything else.’”

Hauling about 50 books around in my car this summer, I confess this quote to be true. I will only need to open these books and be back at the lake, or in New York, or at a wedding in Ohio… And having already written about the pleasure of being absorbed by a novel, and then living novels, it seems only fitting to read a novel where the characters really and truly do come to life—even if they are slightly destructive. I’m still going to wish for dragons.

[Oh, look! It’s going to be a movie… sigh. As always, I have mixed feelings about books becoming movies.]