★★★★☆ Portal fantasy without portals

Inkdeath

Cornelia Funke, Allan Corduner (narrator)

I discovered audible in 2004 and began listening to audiobooks while driving and working out. Among the very first I listened to were the Inkworld trilogy. They were great! Recently I learned that the Inkworld trilogy is no longer a trilogy, as Cornelia Funke has published a fourth novel, Die Farbe der Rache. In English that's The Color of Revenge, to be released 12-Nov-2024. But the original German is available already, und zwar, it is sitting on my bookshelf right now. Since I first listened to the original trilogy twenty years ago, I decided to listen to it once again before tackling Die Farbe der Rache. And I have now done that. I can confirm that the trilogy is as good as I remembered.

The premise of Inkworld is that certain particularly skilled readers can, by reading aloud, bring characters from works of fiction into our world, and also the reverse, read characters from our world into fictional worlds. Although this in principle works with any book -- indeed, we see instances of fairy tale characters and a boy from The Arabian Nights being read out into our world -- most of the story of the trilogy concerns a particular fantasy novel called Inkheart, written by an author named Fenoglio. Fenoglio is a character in the trilogy, and the Inkheart that he wrote is a fictional book in the novel Inkheart that Funke wrote.

In Inkspell almost all the series characters had been read into Fenoglio's novel. A few were left behind in our world, but very early in Inkdeath those left-behind characters also get read into the Inkworld. The consequence is that almost the whole of the story of Inkdeath takes place within the Inkworld. It feels, consequently, very much like familiar portal fantasy, although there are no portals per se. The magic of reading aloud still plays a role in this story, but it is more like conventional wizardry -- a way to exert magical power on the world that follows certain rules.

It is for this reason that I give Inkdeath only a four-star rating. It is still a very good fantasy novel, but it feels more conventional to me than the first two novels, where the magic of reading aloud was more central. Another reason for the lower rating was the narrator Allan Corduner, who I felt was merely competent.

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