On The Internet, No-one Need Know You’re a Homunculus

‘Temple Cloud’ wasn’t my first choice of screen name.

I initially toyed with the idea of calling myself Fliegenbein, after a character in the fantasy novel Dragon Rider by Cornelia Funke.  On our honeymoon, my husband and I found an English version of Dragon Rider in a second-hand bookshop, and read it to each other as a bedtime story. 

I loved it so much that when we got home, I read Drachenreiter and its sequel, Die Feder Eines Greifs, in the original German with the aid of a dictionary.  Since this was the first time I had attempted to read anything in German since completing my GCSEs twenty years earlier, at first I made my way through the books at about the pace of an ant crawling across the page, peering back across the great vista of a German sentence to try to reconstruct what on earth had been going on.

The plot of Dragon Rider is approximately what Watership Down would be if it starred dragons instead of rabbits, with a touch of Kipling’s The White Seal.  Most synopses of the plot start with the three obviously good characters: Lung the dragon (called Firedrake in the English version), his kobold friend Schwefelfell (who becomes Sorrel the brownie – mainly because calling her a brownie allows the translator some truly groanworthy puns), and Ben, the orphaned boy they make friends with along their way.  But the character I felt for was someone I was not sure I was supposed to like at all.

Fliegenbein (called Twigleg in the English translation) is a classic example of the stock fantasy figure that Diana Wynne Jones refers to in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland as the Unpleasant Stranger.  This is the mysterious character who attaches himself to the group of heroes and whom no-one likes or trusts, and who is probably a spy for the Dark Lord.  The fact that he has dead-white skin and red eyes is an obvious warning.

But, as Jones notes, the Unpleasant Stranger may equally turn out to be someone who has a personal grudge against the Dark Lord, and will help the heroes to defeat him.  Fliegenbein, in fact, fulfils both versions of this trope.  He is one of a group of twelve homunculi created by an evil alchemist to be slaves to the villain, Nesselbrand.  Given that Nesselbrand has murdered all Fliegenbein’s brothers, he is too terrified to disobey his ferocious master – but, equally, has every reason to want revenge.

So, when Nesselbrand sends Fliegenbein to follow Lung, Schwefelfell and Ben, he finds himself, for the first time since his brothers were alive, encountering people who are actually friendly to him.  Reluctantly, inescapably, he comes to realise that he loves Ben, and has to make the most dangerous decision of his life to protect his new friend.

To me, Fliegenbein is one of the most interesting characters in the books.  Ben can seem implausibly friendly, trusting and generous for a street child and escapee from a care home (though admittedly, it becomes fairly clear that Ben is no ordinary child).  Fliegenbein, by contrast, is entirely believable as someone who has (just about) survived growing up in an abusive environment, has suffered so much grief and loss that he doesn’t want to risk loving anyone again, and can’t believe that things will change, or that anyone who knew the truth about him could still love him.

Tellingly, after the happy ending of the first book, Fliegenbein in the sequel is even more angsty than before.  Now living with Ben and his adoptive family, and working in cryptozoological conservation, he has more reason to be happy than when we first met him, and has become a much more caring and sympathetic person.  But being part of a family again forces him to remember how desperately he misses his own family.  At the same time, he feels guilty about dwelling on his own problems at all, instead of thinking solely about helping other people.

In many ways, I identify with Fliegenbein.  Like him, I am a geek who loves reading and learning languages, and learned early in life to hide away in books because they were so much less threatening than the outside world.  Like him, I’ve discovered that escaping from crushing loneliness and starting a new life with the person I love doesn’t make my problems disappear overnight, but that it can help me to be willing to change.

In other ways, Fliegenbein is the person I want to be.  I admire the way that he is constantly willing to learn.  This is someone who was created by a seventeenth-century alchemist and has lived most of his life in a derelict castle, working as a skivvy to a ferocious monster.  Yet he found time to educate himself from the various books in the castle – for example, he taught himself Urdu in order to study Indian holy scriptures.  On encountering the modern world, he soon gets the hang of using computers and turns out to be brilliant at programming.

Fliegenbein’s relationship with Ben could have been written as a picture of a believer’s relationship with God: a mixture of warm intimacy, extreme reverence, and trusting obedience, to the point where Fliegenbein is willing to try to overcome his natural timidity and come with Ben on whatever hair-raising quest they need to go on next.  Whether it is fair to Ben to idolise him that much is another matter, but I wish I loved and trusted God that much.

So I have decided not to use a fictional character’s name as my screen name, because I want to make it clear when I’m talking about someone in a book, and when I’m talking about myself.  (In this blog, I will probably do both quite a lot.)  Instead, I have decided to rename myself Temple Cloud, after a village in Somerset.  But the reason for that requires a post of its own.