When I first saw commercials for the movie Inkheart during Winter Break, I felt both apprehension and excitement. Inkheart, like Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass and C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, had been a favorite childhood book.
When reading books, especially those in the fantasy, action or adventure genres, I like to imagine the story as if it was playing in my head, like a movie reel.
This complicates the movie-going experience. In some cases, like Narnia, the movie versions were entertaining and close enough to their origins. Others, like The Golden Compass, butchered everything I enjoyed about the novel. With this in mind, I was a little apprehensive about ruining my Inkheart experience by watching the movie.
I received a copy of Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart for my 13th birthday. Inkheart was the quintessential young adult fantasy — it had the moody, preteen girl, the promise of future romance and the fantasy-esque action sequences to accompany strong, vivid characters.
I had already fallen in love with Funke’s writing after reading her breakthrough novel, The Thief Lord. Yet Inkheart touched me in a way that The Thief Lord never did. Perhaps it was because the protagonist — 13-year-old Meggie Folchart — was female and exactly my age. Or perhaps it was because the decisions that Meggie was forced to make resonated with the difficulties and turbulences of those wonderful pubescent years.
In any case, after seeing the movie previews for Inkheart, I found myself rifling through a box of childhood favorites to find my copy of Inkheart. The book didn’t read quite the same as an 18-year-old college student, and I also found myself evaluating young adult literature differently than I had in middle school.
Inkheart, unlike other novels characterized as YA, presents a theme that is both challenging and unsettling — the power that accompanies every word, whether it is spoken, read or written. Meggie’s father, Mo, has the power to read people in and out of books and to convey them from the Ink World to the Real World. Fenoglio, a writer in the Real World, has the power to write people into books and thus can change the future and past of all the characters in the Ink World.
Though such a power might initially seem enthralling, Inkheart presents this ability as a curse. Mo accidentally read — and trapped — his wife Resa into a book, and Fenoglio is captured by the evil Capricorn, the novel’s antagonist who wants to see his ending changed. Yet rather than relying on the words themselves, Funke tends to use character stereotypes, such as the orphaned daughter or the conflicted shapeshifter, to play with the reader’s emotions.
The overuse of character stereotypes is the norm in YA literature; traditionally, “children’s books” relied on the typical “good guy” or “bad guy” in order to communicate storylines while “adult books” employed complex characters and themes. Yet today, there is a collapsing distinction between “children’s books” and “adult books.” For instance, novels like J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter or Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight find readers across the age spectrum. The Radcliffe Publishing Course released a list of the top-100 modern novels in 1998 and included “children’s books,” such as Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White and Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne. And although Inkheart might rely occasionally on character stereotypes, it raises “adult themes” about the censure of literature and the power of a single misspoken word.
While Inkheart might not deserve inclusion in a list of the best modern novels, it is certainly a warming and entertaining book that achieves what many novels cannot — bridging the gap between ponderously heavy literary elements and an exciting adventure story. And while you might find Inkheart in the YA section of the library, I would without hesitation recommend it to others my age.
My fondness for the novel is keeping me from watching the movie. Like other book-to-movie adaptations, Inkheart didn’t receive a warm critical reception. The New York Times called it “a movie that squanders far too much of its magic.” The Boston Globe points out the most obvious problem: “Why bother seeing it if you can stay home and read a book instead?” I’ve decided to take the advice offered by critics and preserve my middle-school memories of Inkheart. Experience tells me the movie in my head is usually better than the movie on the screen.
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