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A couple of days ago I finished reading Jean Plaidy’s Rose Without a Thorn, a historical novel about Katherine Howard (5th wife of Henry VIII—beheaded) and I’ve just started Cornelia Funke’s Inkdeath, the 3rd and final novel in her Inkworld trilogy. Inkdeath is going to take me a while to read. It’s 663 pages long and even though it’s a young adult novel the prose is dense and rich like liqueur. Funke’s Inkworld series is all about books and reading. One of the characters, Fenoglio, is an author who is magically transported into his own book. However another character, Orpheus, has the ability to rewrite Fenoglio’s book and alter the reality therein. Fenoglio wonders, “…was there any worse fate than having to watch something else twist your own words, adding colorful touches—in very bad taste—to the world you’d made?” Reading this I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of guilt as a writer of fan fiction. Like Orpheus, I delight in messing about with other people’s imagined worlds and adding lurid elements to their stories. I’ve always considered it quite a creative enterprise however Fenoglio’s dilemma does make me look at it from another perspective. One thing I can take some consolation in is the fact that nothing in the Inkworld series is clean cut. Fenoglio, with his sense of authorship towards the world around him, is a very ambiguous character not nearly so much in control of the world he created as he would like to be. When I finish Inkdeath, I’ve decided that I’m going to reread Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. I read it for the first time back in the fall of 2004 but I really plowed through it, I’d like to go back and do a more leisurely reading taking in more of the details.
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