The Thief Lord

Funke, Cornelia. The Thief Lord. The Chicken House, 2003.

Will I get kicked out of the club if I admit that I was not reading under the covers to finish this highly-acclaimed fantasy book by German kids' lit rockstar Cornelia Funke?

Let me backtrack to say that this is undoubtedly a fantastic, well-written and clearly well-loved book. And that I did enjoy it and will certainly recommend it highly. But, given all the hype, I expected to be staying up way past my bedtime and was somewhat disappointed to just enjoy it. Something about it just didn't speak to the part of me that can get absolutely lost in children's and YA fantasy. Perhaps it just isn't fair to read any book so soon after Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.

This book centers on the story of two siblings who have run away from their nasty aunt, Esther Hartlieb, who wants to adopt only the younger five year-old Bo but not his twelve year-old brother Prosper. Not wanting to be separated, the boys run away to Venice where they meet up with a motley group of children who live in an abandoned movie theatre and are supported by the loot of the mysterious "Thief Lord."

The children soon find themselves on the run from a Victor, a determined sleuth hired by their aunt, who turns out to be more interesting than he first appears. Things get even more complicated when the secretive "Conte" hires the Thief Lord and his gang of children to steal a strange wooden wing that holds the key to unlocking the unworldly powers of an old merry-go-round.

This is the classic orphan story - exploring the world of children living without adults, the theme of age and youth, and the search for a new family in which to belong. It is highly readable, and has a giant fan-base of young readers, but somehow it failed to capture the adult reader in me that still wants to be carried away by "children's" novels. It wasn't the neatly tied-up happy ending, because I didn't wait until the end to become slightly dis-engaged, but maybe something more to do with a lack of depth and involvement in individual characters or the particular flavour of light but action-packed adventure. I'm not sure. I do have a sense, however, that this is more a matter of personal taste than a reflection of the quality of the writing.

His Dark Materials

Pullman, Philip. The Golden Compass. New York: Random House, 1996.

Why has it taken me so long to read Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy? This is fantasy at its best, the rare kind of writing that comes recommended with equal zeal from Blake scholars, adults looking for a good read, and children. This is un-put-downable, thought-provoking, beautiful writing (yes - you can have all three!).

In an alternate but parallel world, Lyra lives with the scholars of Oxford who have taken care of her since both her parents died. Or so she has always been told. A series of events lead her north to a land of snow, armoured polar bears, witches, a secret research station, and the answers to her questions about the disappearances of local children. After she discovers the horrible truth about her mother, she is determined to find her father and help him with his esoteric work involving that strange substance, the Dust, that is the source of so much conflict and fear. But she is soon to discover that the world is so much more complicated than she ever understood. And meanwhile, unbeknownst to her, everyone is watching Lyra to see if she will fulfill the destiny that has been foretold for her.

Borrowing heavily from Paradise Lost and Blake's ideas of Innocence and Experience, the story is dense and intellectually compelling while still remaining immensely readable. I'm sure I've missed more literary references than I've caught, but still I don't feel at all shut out of the story. On the contrary, this feels like an incredibly accessible book. But also the kind of book that will most surely do more for renewing current readership of Milton and Blake than any other publication in recent years (as a new edition of Paradise Lost, with forward by Pullman, will attest).

But as I make my way into the third book in the trilogy (currently and tragically on hold as homework calls), I can't help but wonder whether a book that so openly describes warring and corrupt factions of the church, and challenges ideas of religion and authority, would have come out of the United States. It was also interesting that in a story of good and evil, the sides are not easily divided - though there is clearly good, there are also many evils warring with each other, and various players will take sides with whatever faction will help them most at a moment in time. Is there more room in British publishing and culture for this kind of open and critical engagement with the world in children's literature? I like the respect that this book implies for its readership of all ages, the unwillingness to dumb-down ideas, the big questions it asks. I also like the fast pace of the action, the intricacies of plot, and the suspense that kept me reading far past my bedtime.

I'm still waiting to see where it's all heading... Excruciating to wait.

The Friends

Yumoto, Kazumi. The Friends. Translated by Cathy Hirano. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996. [Originally published in Japanese in 1992].

When Yamashita goes to his grandmother's funeral, he is the first of the three friends to see a dead body and the event ignites a strange fascination with death for the group of friends. Following the inimitable logic of twelve-year old boys, the three friends begin spying on an old man in the hopes of catching the moment when he dies so they can all see exactly what a dead body looks like.

Kirkus Reviews (as quoted on the back cover) calls the book "a Japanese Stand By Me," and I was determined to disagree with what seemed like a glib cultural translation of a Japanese novel into something recognizable for a North American audience. But as I read the story I had to admit that there was an uncanny similarity in both the tone and content of the story. If Stand By Me was set in a Japanese city in the last summer before junior high school, and the journey took place in a series of visits (squished into the spaces between "cram school" and soccer camp) to an old man's house... There is the same playful exchange of insults between friends, conflict with the rival group of boys from school, a shared and ongoing obsession with death, enough of a sense of danger and risk to give the feeling of a journey into the unknown, and those occasional moments of honesty between boys when toughness and bravado give way to reveal closely guarded vulnerabilities and uncertainties.

What results is a quirky, moving, surprisingly gentle coming-of-age story about friendship, death, and discovery. In the midst of enormous pressure to do well on the upcoming tests that will determine what stream of junior high schools they attend, the boys begin to develop an understanding of the world that has nothing at all to do with school. Kiyama, Kawake and Yamashita are poised on the balance point between childhood and something new. As always, the inevitable changes that will soon send them in different directions are part of what make this last summer of childhood that much more poignant.

The translation feels seamless, and the prose is that rare creature which manages to be subtle, straightforward and unsentimental, yet emotionally resonant. I was unprepared to be find myself starting to cry at several small scenes in the middle of a nearby coffee shop as I read the book in a single sitting.

The descriptions of death, bodies and cremation are matter-of-fact - down to details about picking out the bones from the ashes in the crematorium with chopsticks to put them in the urn - probably more so than most North American novels for the same age group. But the idea of death is approached with that particular combination of fear and fascinated curiosity that is so recognizably that of a twelve-year old mind.

This is an amazing book - immensely readable, believable and likable. No surprise at all that it won the Batcherlder Award for translated children's books.