Children's Literature/Robert Dunbar: Prague, according to John Banville's recent book on the city, is "mysterious, jumbled, fantastical, absurd".
This is the factual, contemporary Prague, but Banville's description comes relevantly to mind in reading Carlo Gébler's August '44, a novel dominated by a remarkable fictional re-creation of the 16th-century city and of one of its most celebrated folk tales. The "mysterious, jumbled, fantastical and absurd", to which might be added a fair measure of the gruesome, are here in quantity and from the mixture comes a novel which does not merely resurrect an amazing story but which also in the process celebrates story itself and its telling.
The act of literary exhumation at the centre of Gébler's novel is set within a framework which, historically, is closer to our own time than the lengthy narrative which it encloses. As the second World War comes to an end, a Jewish family and their friends are in hiding in a cave in the south of France, fearful of discovery by the Nazis. Their histories and hardships have resulted in all sorts of tensions and anxieties but Gébler's principal focus is on Saul Roth, a child transformed by his experiences into near feral status. In an attempt to hasten his recovery and to prepare him for the group's anticipated liberation, one of them, Claude, embarks on a re-telling of the story of the golem, the human figure created from clay who had been, some three centuries earlier, the principal agent in protecting Prague's Jews from Christian persecution.
In an earlier life Claude has been a choreographer and his engrossing re-telling appropriately demonstrates a choreographic skill in organising and shaping his semi-historical, semi-mythical material into a narrative which simultaneously relates to the destinies of those listening in the cave and of those - including the reader - who have survived. As it reaches its conclusion, Claude comments on his own technique: "When you take a story on, you must make it yours. You must change it. In this way you make it your own". It is precisely and triumphantly what he and Gébler have done. The potential of art to heal, as embodied universally in ancient myth and legend, is presented here with conviction - but, as the novel's closing pages will corroborate, in a manner which poignantly balances the romantic and the realistic.
Aubrey Flegg's Wings Over Delft may, at first glance, favour a more straightforward linear structure than Gébler's novel, but a more careful reading reveals that here too is a story full of individual stories, each of which contributes to a final picture which is immensely rich and colourful. The pictorial metaphor is warranted, given that Flegg's novel is largely set in the Dutch art world of the late 17th century and that many of its most exquisitely imagined scenes take place in a painter's studio. The particularly evocative opening chapter, in which we meet Louise, the 16-year-old heroine, introduces us also to the wider cultural, religious and intellectual world in which, sometimes happily, sometimes less so, she will move.
It is one of Flegg's most impressive achievements that he portrays so credibly a society (and indeed a Europe) on the verge of numerous forms of discovery, not least about itself. This setting, in which established conservative and fundamentalist values are frequently pitted against radical and iconoclastic notions of change, becomes the perfect background for a story where Louise is tragically caught, when it comes to choosing a husband, between what her heart dictates and what others wish to impose. The first book in a projected trilogy, this is an assured piece of writing which more than fulfils the promise expressed in the Whitman lines which serve as its epigraph: "You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself".
While the prospect of "listening to all sides" in a book as long and complex as Cornelia Funke's Inkheart may initially seem daunting, the reward for perseverance will be proportionately gratifying. Almost certainly, no other book intended primarily for children has ever experimented so enjoyably - if sometimes eerily - with the possibilities of metafiction: its starting point is to include among its cast a bookbinder who has the gift of reading aloud with such energy and empathy that characters come - literally - alive.
Having liberated a villain and his henchmen from a book called Inkheart (!) and now witnessing their intrusion into their lives, Mo the bookbinder and his daughter, Meggie, become embroiled in a succession of adventures where traditional understandings of words such as "fact" and "fiction" soon become redundant. But what never palls is Funke's apparently endless powers of invention or the obvious passion with which she draws on the world of books (including children's books) which provides her intriguing array of intertextual allusion. Writing stories, she says in her final sentence, "is a kind of magic", a kind which she, Gébler and Flegg have demonstrated in these most engaging fictions.
Robert Dunbar is Head of English at the Church of Ireland College of Education, Rathmines, Dublin
August '44 By Carlo Gébler. Egmont, 369pp. £5.99
Wings Over Delft By Aubrey Flegg. O'Brien, 188pp. €9.95
Inkheart By Cornelia Funke. The Chicken House, 543pp. £12.99