Temple Cloud

First of all, I have just noticed something very weird.   The title page of this book says ‘Translated from English by Tobias Schnettler’.   I knew that Cornelia Funke now lives in America (correction – she did live in America until 2021, but now lives in Italy), but it hadn’t occurred to me that she wasn’t still writing in German, her first language.   But even if she has decided to write in English, why would she not write her own translation into German? I did a bit of digging and found this interview , in which Funke explains her decision: The Aurelia Curse  is the first book in the Dragon Rider series that you have written straight into English. How did that affect the process of writing for you? Did it present any particular challenges? I wrote  The Glass of Lead and Gold  in English and the adaptation of  Pan’s Labyrinth  as a novel in English. And I had written several short stories and  Angel Heart , a text I wrote...

Now we get a chapter from the point of view of Kupfer – as we will have to call him, as the book doesn’t tell us his real name .  He resents the fact that Cadoc Aalstrom, the man who enslaved him, can’t even pronounce his real name – but then, probably most human readers couldn’t either .  Since Kupfer is far more intelligent than his master, one of his duties is to create horrific-sounding hybrid creatures : lobster-cuttlefish, starling-drones, and copper-wasps, and even a manticore – for which Cadoc Aalstrom takes all the credit. So how did Kupfer even come into his service?   Well, if a human discovers the existence of a copperman, then the copperman is under a curse  to serve that human until death.   The only thing that can break the curse is – dragon fire.   I think we can guess where this is going – but as far as Kupfer knows , dragons have disappeared. So Kupfer, as the reluctant minion of a villain much less intelligent than himself, has obvio...

The next couple of chapters continue to explore the lives of the families of dragons, humans, and homunculi – and the mysterious threat that Barnabas and Kahurangi were discussing in the opening chapters .  Barnabas and Guinever arrive in the Rim of Heaven, and meet Lung’s children: Schuppe (Scale) and his ‘twin sister’ Mondtanz (Moon-Dance), and Stachelschwanz (Spike-Tail), their three-minutes-younger brother.  Since they all appear to be from the same hatching, I’m not sure what makes Schuppe and Mondtanz twins and Stachelschwanz not.  After all, considering that Schuppe and Mondtanz are different sexes, it seems highly unlikely that they were hatched from the same egg – though as this report  shows, human ‘semi-identical’ twins are occasionally conceived from a single egg, and can be different sexes. Ben passes on to his family the (incomprehensible to him) message that Freddie and Fliegenbein had given him: that there has been ‘a comparable occurrence’ on the S...

Unusually early for this series, we get a villain point-of-view chapter next.   In the second book, it struck me that the main villain, Kraa, then the leader of the griffin colony, had a lot in common with Nesselbrand, the villain of the first book: vain, pitiless, tyrannical and paranoid, and growing old and lazy. In this book, Cadoc Aalstrom, rather than being a fantastic creature, is a human who regards fantastic beings as a resource to hunt down and exploit, so in that respect he has more in common with Petrosius von Bilsenkraut, the alchemist who had created Nesselbrand.   Unlike Petrosius, however, he is not a genius who would be capable of creating a cyborg dragon like Nesselbrand or a homunculus like Fliegenbein.   Instead, he relies on the abilities of his reluctant fabulous-being slave, a copper elemental whom he simply calls Kupfer (Copper), and whom he terrorises just as Nesselbrand terrorised Fliegenbein.   Okay, you can’t threaten to eat someone wh...

One hold-up that I hadn’t considered in taking up a sponsored reading challenge and deciding to blog about what I was reading was how long it takes to blog about books – and that until I’ve finished blogging about one book, I feel guilty about starting to read the next.   Nonetheless, I hadn’t been able to resist starting the latest of the Drachenreiter books, in spite of the fact that PDB11 was already reading it and I had to be careful not to lose his place. PDB11 had said that he found Der Fluch der Aurelia ( The Aurelia Curse ) hard going compared to the first two books, Drachenreiter ( Dragon Rider ) and Die Feder eines Greifs ( A Griffin’s Feather ).   For anyone who hasn’t read these, in Drachenreiter , Ben, an orphaned boy living on the streets of an unnamed German town, first meets heroic dragon Lung and his kobold friend Schwefelfell who are on a quest.   As Ben joins them on their travels, he befriends a homunculus, Fliegenbein, and eventually finds a...