Inkdeath: Cornelia Funke Brings the Inkheart Trilogy to a Dark and Dazzling End
Some call them books for young readers, but few texts are better or more demanding than Cornelia Funke’s novels. After Inkheart and Inkspell, the trilogy reaches a dazzling conclusion in Inkdeath (2007), and there are black shadows in the Inkworld.
Author: Cornelia Funke
Title: Inkdeath (Tintentod, 2007), Inkheart trilogy 3
Format: English paperback (Chicken House), 736 pages
Scope: Final book of the original Inkheart trilogy
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/1913322327 (ASIN 1913322327)
A Fragile Peace
Only a few weeks have passed since the White Women took Dustfinger away. Meggie and her parents are living on a peaceful, abandoned farm that almost makes them forget the nightmares they went through at the Castle of Night. But when night falls and Meggie looks impatiently out of the window, waiting for Farid, she hears the cry of a jay... and then her father disappears into the forest.
The Bluejay
Mo, the bookbinder who can read stories to life, has become the Bluejay, the outlaw hero of the Inkworld, and the role is taking him over. To save his family and the friends he has made, he will have to strike a dangerous bargain with Death itself, while the tyrant Adderhead grows ever more desperate to escape his own mortality.
A World Out of Control
The fascination of the trilogy’s final book lies in what has happened to the story-within-the-story. Fenoglio, the old writer who created the Inkworld, has lost control of it: his characters do things he never intended, and his words no longer change events. Meanwhile Orpheus, a vain young man who can also read things into being, is rewriting the world for his own ends. Funke turns the question of who owns a story, its author, its readers or its characters, into the engine of the plot.
Meggie, Farid and Growing Up
Meggie is no longer the child of Inkheart. She is torn between her parents, who long to go home, and the Inkworld, which she has come to love, and between Farid, the fire-eater’s devoted apprentice, and Doria, a boy from the Inkworld who sees her differently. Resa, her mother, is expecting another child. These family tensions give the book an emotional weight that balances the battles and the bargains with Death.
The Price of Being a Hero
The Bluejay is a character Fenoglio invented, and Mo’s slow transformation into him is one of the trilogy’s most interesting ideas: a gentle bookbinder discovers that he enjoys the outlaw’s life and its violence more than he should. The White Women, pale servants of Death who whisper to the dying, are among Funke’s most memorable creations, and the White Book that keeps the Adderhead immortal, bound by Mo himself in Inkspell, ties the three books together.
Translation and Continuation
The book appeared in German as Tintentod in 2007 and in English in 2008, again translated by Anthea Bell, whose versions are a large part of the trilogy’s success in English. After a long pause, Funke returned to the Inkworld with The Colour of Revenge, which picks up Mo and Meggie’s story years later.
Who It Is For
Confident readers from about twelve upwards, and adults who love books about books. At more than seven hundred pages it demands commitment, but the reward is an ending that takes its characters, and its readers, seriously. Funke trusts young readers with loss, moral ambiguity and an unresolved sense of longing, which is exactly what the original review meant by calling her novels demanding.
Why Read It
It is the longest and darkest book of the trilogy, but also the most moving. Read the three in order; if you loved Inkheart, this ending is well worth the journey. Funke later returned to the world with The Colour of Revenge.
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