Drachenerwachen Chapters 1 - 6: The Story Begins

 

Warning – this post contains spoilers!  Not very many, as it only covers the first few chapters, and you can probably guess where the story is going, but I thought I should warn you.

So we come to the first book on my reading list.  To start off with, we have a glittery picture of a lovable-looking dragon’s face, in front of blue mountains which look nothing like the urban setting of – at least – the first half of the book.  And the title is – well, as printed on the front cover, it looks like two words, which I initially assumed meant something like ‘Dragons Awaken,’ or, to make the rhyme slightly better, ‘Drakes Awake’.  But a glance at the spine confirms that this is one word which had to be broken up for convenience, and means ‘Dragon-Awakening’.

This is a book which PDB11 and I brought home from a holiday in Germany a few years ago.  This seems appropriate, given that the book opens with a character coming from her holidays.  She is ‘not alone’.  She has her faithful holiday companion: her pink wheeled suitcase, the Pink Prince, full to the lid of all the souvenirs she has brought back from abroad, from nail-varnish to laptops to bedclothes.

Or does she?...

So, in the first chapter, we meet the main (human) characters in the narrative.  Frau Tossilo, the woman with the suitcase, likes shopping, and pink, and fluffy dressing-gowns.  She dislikes children, especially Johann and Janka, the brother and sister who live in the flat above hers, two very normal siblings who bicker amiably with each other one minute and laugh together (mainly at Frau Tossilo) the next.  Frau Tossilo just wants to relax in her cosy flat, alone with her memories of the charming bedspread salesman she had met while abroad.  But there are strange scratching and knocking sounds coming from her suitcase.

So, over the next few chapters, we alternate between Frau Tossilo’s story, and short, simple vignettes of Johann and Janka’s lives, which are taken up with normal interests for young teenagers or pre-teens.  Johann loves to lose himself in computer fantasy adventure games, plans to be a game designer when he grows up and is impatient with any school subject that is not directly relevant to this, and wishes he had a better computer.  Janka loves acrobatics, and wishes that her older brother hadn’t lost interest in circus skills.

So far – no dragons seen.  And yet, we are constantly prepared for them.  Johann’s computer games surely involve them.  Janka’s favourite sweets are dragon-shaped chocolates called Dragon Drops which taste so delicious that they make you feel as though you’re flying – and her acrobatic stunts are probably the nearest a human can get to flight without special equipment.  And, most significantly, both siblings refer to their grumpy neighbour Frau Tossilo as ‘the Poison Dragon’.

In the meantime, it is Frau Tossilo’s actions that actually advance the plot – although it seems to have been mere chance that made her take a stranger’s identical suitcase off the baggage claim in mistake for her own.  But it is her petulance at being deprived of her luggage, with her favourite pink dressing-gown, that makes her decide to root through the stranger’s belongings – and her sense of ‘chasm-deep longing’ that, when she finds a strange metal casket with a red light that blinks like a time-bomb, makes her feel compelled to unlock it.  She doesn’t care that it isn’t hers, or that it might explode.   She notices in passing that the casket is ‘enchantingly beautiful’, and her bizarre behaviour suggests that she may literally be enchanted.

Naturally, when she manages to unlock the casket and discovers a strange gemstone, midnight-blue with gold streaks, she is too genre-blind to realise that she has found a dragon’s egg. 

What she does know is that she feels the inexplicable urge to take the ‘stone’ out of its silken wrapping, hold it to her breast, rock it gently and sing lullabies to it.  And that she is definitely not going to admit to anyone that she has accidentally acquired someone else’s suitcase and its contents.

This reminds me of the episode of Drop the Dead Donkey where Sally gets pregnant from one of her many one-night stands, and is astonished to find herself actually feeling affection for her unborn child.  Of course, because Drop the Dead Donkey is a sitcom, Sally can’t be allowed actually to be a parent – it would change the whole dynamic of the show if she metamorphosed from shallow, selfish rich bitch into an earnest mummy discussing parenting with Helen and George, just as it would change Red Dwarf if Lister had parental responsibility for any of the babies he is father or mother to.

Drachenerwachen, by contrast, is a novel – or rather, the beginning of a series of novels.  So, as this is just the start, it is fairly clear that Frau Tossilo’s inexplicable (to her) maternal feelings for a mysterious ‘stone’ that feels like a cross between a balloon and a not-quite-solidified drop of resin are the beginning of a time of bonding with a dragon which is likely to change her life.

It’s embarrassing to admit it, but I probably have at least some traits in common with Frau Tossilo.  Not in disliking children (I don’t have any children of my own, but I generally enjoy spending time with friends’ children, whether listening to a five-year-old showing off all the model dragons he built of Duplo, or listening to a teenager expounding on how she would rewrite the National Curriculum if she was in charge).  Nor have I ever had enough money to have the chance to become addicted to compulsive shopping and coming back from holiday with more souvenirs than I know what to do with (though the photo at the top of this post shows Drachenerwachen surrounded by the cuddly toys that we acquired on the same trip.)

However, I certainly share Frau Tossilo’s affection for dressing-gowns and blankets with fluffy textures that you can snuggle your face into.  Probably, for Frau Tossilo, dressing-gowns are a substitute for cuddles.  I can certainly recognise her experience of being so used to being lonely that she doesn’t even know that there are other states of being, until someone she can love comes into her life.

So, is this a children’s book?  Well, obviously, yes it is.  But nevertheless, it is a children’s book in which the plot is driven by an adult character’s experience of loneliness and frustrated maternal instinct.  Frau Tossilo may be oblivious and law-breaking, but she is a person, not the stereotypical useless adult who exists only to be so ineffectual that younger characters take over the story.