Inkheart

Since the success of Harry Potter, film makers have cast their beady eyes over children’s literature, so it is no surprise to learn the Inkheart will be released as a movie in 2006. And for once, I am betting that the movie version will be an improvement.
Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart, translated from the original German by Anthea Bell, purports to be about Meggie, who goes on an adventure with her father, her aunt and a slew of characters who have come to life from a children’s book. Unfortunately, I can tell you a great deal more about these other characters than I can about Meggie, who remains shadowy throughout.
Meggie’s father is Mo, a book binder with the ability to bring to life characters from a book when he reads aloud. One night he is visited by a strange man called Dustfinger, who calls Mo `Silvertongue’. The next day Mo takes his daughter to the house of his wife’s Aunt Elinor, a fanatical book collector, dragging the child away from her home and her school, and not for the first time. Mo is on the run from Capricorn, a black-hearted (get it?) villain who wants a book that Mo has in his possession.As the supposed lead character, Meggie simply doesn’t cut the mustard. She is a bystander, whipped up in events over which she has no control and little chance to change the outcome. Even her big moment, at the end, is handed over to another character when Meggie fails to carry it out.
Compare this to the kids of Lemony Snicket’s delightful A Series of Unfortunate Events. Surrounded by adults afflicted by villainy and stupidity, the Beaudelaire children have to figure everything out for themselves and are active in sorting out the disasters they get into. Not so Meggie. Funke refuses to allow her to think for herself, and even on the rare occasion that Meggie actually tries to do something, Funke quickly has her recaptured or foiled in some other way. No, it is up to Mo, Dustfinger and even the mad book lover Aunt, to save the day.
As for character development, Funke completely funks that with Meggie. She draws an irresistible picture of another author, fleshes out the book collecting Aunt, and makes Dustfinger, Silvertongue, Capricorn and a baddie called Basta, positively come alive on the pages. But Meggie is the one we are interested in – Meggie, who has been dragged around most of her life because of her father’s silver tongue, Meggie who has never had a chance to make friends and loses herself in books – Meggie, who lost her mother at the age of three and only feels mild jealousy at the thought of her. Meggie has no substance at all, because we barely know what she feels about any of this. Funke has hung a plot on the poor child, and never gives her a chance to affect the outcome. Even that is left up to other characters – Meggie is excluded from the plan to outwit the baddies, until it becomes necessary for her to know.
In all great children’s books, the children are the stars of the show. No one keeps anything from Harry Potter, no one hides the entrance to Narnia from the Pevensie children, no one snatches the moment of victory from even Enid Blyton’s jolly bunch of Famous Fives and Stupendous Sevens.
So I am predicting that the film makers, who understand this basic principle very well, won’t stand for it in their version. Meggie will morph from a victim of circumstances to an active key player, and the final, pivotal moment at the end of the book will be all hers – as it should be here.

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