Der Fluch der Aurelia Chapters 1-2: A Flower of Feathers; Over the Clouds
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 human adoptive family,
archaeologist Barnabas Wiesengrund and his wife and daughter. (Since I am reading the German version, I
will stick to the German names for characters.)
Die Feder eines Greifs opens a couple
of years later, with the Wiesengrund family now running a Fantastic Nature Reserve called MÍMAMEIĐR in Norway, while Lung and Schwefelfell are now settled far
away in the Himalayas, with Lung happily married and about to become a
father. Although the plot was about the
work of the Wiesengrund family and their friends in cryptozoological
conservation, much of the emotional heart of the book is about Ben feeling torn
between his human family (and his work at MÍMAMEIĐR) and his dragon friends,
and Fliegenbein’s grief at being The Last of His Kind, since his brothers had been killed centuries ago by the villain of the first
book.
The third instalment
Die Vulkan-Mission (The Volcano Mission), an adventure
centred on Fliegenbein, Schwefelfell, and talking rat Lola, which it was hinted
would be a graphic novel, but wound up only being made as a radio play (and
only in German). As my German listening skills
aren’t up to following this much spoken word, I didn’t even try listening to
this, so I’ve come straight in on part four.
We are still
only a few months after the events of Die
Feder eines Greifs, and Ben is currently staying with the dragons. The story opens with Barnabas, his daughter
Guinever, and their fjord-troll friend Hothbrodd in New Zealand, visiting
Barnabas’s Maori friend Kahurangi Ngata, who was an old school-friend of his. Hothbrodd lampshades the implausible number of old friends that Barnabas has all over the world,
whether humans like Kahurangi, fantastic beings like Hothbrodd, or talking
animals.
The group watch
a vast flock of assorted seabirds behaving strangely, forming themselves into a
circular pattern like a flower. Barnabas
and Kahurangi discuss anxiously (and incomprehensibly to Guinever and the
reader) whether this is anything to do with ‘the story’ and reassure themselves
that it doesn’t really mean anything unless the same thing happens in three
more places: ‘Four to announce her, four
to receive her.’
They reflect
that they just have to hope that the other person who would be interested in
all this never comes to hear about it.
Kahurangi comments that this person hasn’t caused much trouble since the
time Barnabas rescued the sky-snake from him around four years ago.
Exasperated at
the way that the human men are talking even more obliquely than sphinxes (and
as Guinever has personally met a sphinx, she knows what she’s talking about),
Guinever asks Hothbrodd to explain.
Hothbrodd, as grumpy and foul-mouthed as usual, explains that the
villain from whom Barnabas had rescued a skysnake was a man named Cadoc
Aalstrom, who was yet another person
Barnabas had known since his schooldays, and that Guinever had better shut up
about the whole thing, especially not tell anyone about the weird behaviour of
the birds, and just look forward to meeting the baby dragons.
We are starting
to learn a bit more of Barnabas’s backstory, which is something Funke has
mostly left unspecified up until now.
(In one of my fanfics I decided that Barnabas was a Peculiar and had spent his childhood in a time loop.)
Now we’re getting some clues in canon.
Guinever learns that her father used to be an enthusiastic swimmer and
diver, but had been traumatised by a bad experience in which he had nearly
drowned while trying – and failing – to rescue a friend from drowning.
We don’t know
yet what the strange pattern of the birds means, but it’s certainly
intriguing. It reminds me of the opening
chapters of Comet in Moominland where images of a star with a tail keep appearing everywhere, the rune of the
Summoning Dark in Thud! and the crop circles appearing everywhere (from a man’s scalp to the cress that
a child has been growing on a damp flannel) in Lords and Ladies.
As with all the Drachenreiter stories, this is thick
with a vast profusion of fantastic beings (PDB11 complained that this was one
of the things he found implausible, that there could be so many fantastic
beings all over the world without most people noticing). In the first chapter, Barnabas has tried
bringing some Bläulinge (small,
cornflower-blue and highly adventurous humanoids) to New Zealand to cull the
invasive opossums who have been eating the eggs of New Zealand’s birds. As PDB11 commented, the description of them
sounds suspiciously similar to the Discworld’s Nac Mac Feegles - though I don’t think Feegles would have fled from an island just because it
had too many birds for their liking.
(Too many lawyers would be another matter!)
A probably minor but very charming mention of rare species comes in the second chapter, when the characters are flying in Hothbrodd’s plane to meet Ben and the dragons. Guinever reflects on how, ever since she was a young child, she had loved her mother’s stories of sky-sheep and cloud-dragons – and the illustration even shows us some of these cloud-animals!
In context, Guinever is reflecting on how each member of her family seems aligned to one of the four classical elements: her father is a man with his feet firmly planted on the ground (and, in his former career as an archaeologist, spent his time digging in the earth); her mother is strongly drawn to water creatures; Guinever, although she took on the task of caring for aquatic creatures at MÍMAMEIĐR, had always longed to ride a pegasus through the sky in search for cloud-creatures (and, in the previous novel, actually became friends with a family of pegasi), and Ben, as the long-prophesied Dragon-Rider, is obviously aligned to fire. But it also reminded me of Christian Morgenstern’s poem Galgenkindes Wiegenlied (Gallows Child’s Lullaby):
‘Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf,
am Himmel steht ein Schaf;
das Schaf, das ist aus Wasserdampf
und kämpt wie du den Lebenskampf.
Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf.’
which Max Knight translates as follows:
‘Sleep, baby,
sleep,
there’s in the sky a sheep;
the sheep is made of cloud and dew
and fights life’s battles just like you.
Sleep, baby, sleep.’
So, this is an interesting start, even before we’ve met my favourite characters – especially Fliegenbein. Is he with Ben in the dragons’ cave? Or, considering that dragon-fire, though harmless to natural creatures in this universe, has the power to undo enchantments (which means that it could turn clever, interesting Fliegenbein back into whatever non-sapient minibeast he was created from), has he decided to stay home? We shall see…
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