Der Fluch der Aurelia Chapters 10: The Wrong Section of Coast

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 for Classical musicians in English, that Jeremy Irons recorded. When he didn’t complain I thought to myself: well, I guess I can write in English now as well I very much love to write in English, as it is a more playful language than German and especially weighty themes can be dealt with much more easily and without getting pompous, a danger one meets easily in my native tongue.

 

Oh well, I had intended my reading project to include some books that were translations into German from other languages.  I just hadn’t expected one by a German author to be among them!

Anyway, I’ll keep on reading it.  So: in Chapter 10, Ben and his family have arrived at the beach where the Aurelia is expected to appear, which, to their dismay, is not in some remote region but in Malibu, California (the area where Funke was living when she wrote this book) on a beach overlooked by numerous houses.  Ben wonders what creatures will come to represent Water, Earth, and Air, since Lung is obviously the representative of Fire.  (Personally, I would love to see Kupfer decide to change sides and greet Aurelia as the representative of Earth.)

He wonders what the Aurelia will look like.  The family have been discussing how she is probably a thousand times larger, or even a million times larger, than the sorts of jellyfish they can find photographs of on the internet.

Even that sounds a bit conservative to me – after all, a creature a million times the size of something else would only be a hundred times as wide and a hundred times as long.  So let’s do a bit more research.

Okay, the world’s biggest known animal is the lion’s mane jellyfish,

and the largest of these ever recorded was 36.5 meters long (its stinging tentacles) and 2.3m in diameter.  So, as the longest blue whale ever recorded was 30 metres long, then if the Aurelia is about 230 metres across, she might genuinely dwarf whales by as much as the cover illustration suggests. 

If the Aurelia is shaped like a scaled-up lion’s mane jellyfish and therefore also has tentacles over 3.6 km long (more than 2 miles), however, she might feel a bit cramped, as while the deepest point in the ocean, the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, is nearly 11km deep, the average depth of the Pacific is only ‎4.28km, and the two next deepest oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific, have an average depth of little over 3.6km.  However, there is no reason why she has to be the same shape as any known species of jellyfish.

As they walk on the beach, with Fliegenbein cuddled in Ben’s arm and Freddie dancing on Guinever’s shoulder to the rhythm of the waves, Ben reflects on how they had managed to smuggle the homunculi through customs in a wooden dolls’ house which Hothbrodd had built specially for the journey.  This is the first time that the difficulty of travelling with fantastic beings without letting anyone know of their existence is even mentioned in the books.  I’m surprised that it is mentioned as a problem here (when people are making a private journey in a wooden aircraft that resembles a Viking ship

and was built and piloted by a troll, probably with a talking, clothes-wearing rat as co-pilot) and not, for example, on the journey (presumably by mainstream travel routes) that the Wiesengrund family would have needed to take to bring Ben and Fliegenbein home with them at the end of the first book, after having caught up with them in Pakistan.  (In my fanfiction, I decided that Fliegenbein had probably got through by crouching in the pocket of Ben’s jacket.)

But – a dolls’ house.  That is – or was – a sensitive point as far as Fliegenbein is concerned.  In the first book, where Guinever suggests to Fliegenbein that if he’s coming to live with them, he could live in her dolls’ house, he indignantly retorts that he is not a doll, and would be far happier living in the cellar, as long as there are books there.  (When you’re a tiny adult living among giant children, you have to be firm about such things.  The Lilliputians in Mistress Masham’s Repose by T. H. White have a lot of trouble with their human-child friend wanting to treat them like dolls, and ‘the Man’ in Raymond Briggs’ graphic novel, despite having walked into a stranger’s home and demanded hospitality, continually accuses his host of treating him like a pet.)

In Die Feder Eines Greifs, a couple of years later, it mentions that Hothbrodd had built, amongst other things, a little house for Fliegenbein which stands on Ben’s bedside table, so that Fliegenbein can be near to Ben, and be lulled to sleep by the sound of his breathing, but still have some privacy.  But that’s all right because it is a house that has been purposely built for him, so doesn’t make him feel that he is being treated like a toy.

The place where Fliegenbein and Freddie now live, however, appears to be an actual dolls’ house, with side panels that open up to expose everything in the house, and conversely can be bolted shut from the outside so that the inhabitants are trapped inside.  On the other hand, it is also a comfortable home with a functioning kitchen, a bath, and books that are a convenient size to read in bed rather than so huge that you have to clamber all over them.  I get the impression that having another homunculus to share his home with helps Fliegenbein to feel a lot more comfortable in his identity as a homunculus.

They meet with yet another of Barnabas’s worldwide collection of friends, Alfonso Fuentes – who is a friend of Cornelia Funke in real life.  (I did a quick internet search on people called Alfonso Fuentes and found lots, from a Puerto Rican composer to a professor of mechanical engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology, but none who really looked as though they were the model for this character.  Funke didn’t necessarily need to use his real name, of course, but a thinly-disguised Jane Goodall and David Attenborough appear in Die Feder eines Greifs as supporters of cryptozoological conservation.  Interestingly, the Australian cartoonist David Morgan-Mar has the same idea about Goodall.)

Anyway, what matters is that Alfonso is a good person who loves the land and all living creatures, and, as all people partake more of one element than the others, Alfonso is of the Earth.  Barnabas greets him by the title of ‘El Brujo’ – ‘the Wizard’ – and introduces his old friend to his wife and children, and to Freddie and Fliegenbein.

It is a running joke throughout this series that, as most people have never seen a homunculus, they struggle to guess what Fliegenbein might be.  In Drachenreiter, Barnabas’s fellow archaeologists rationalise that he must be some kind of robot, whereas Guinever, being used to fantastic beings, comments that he is the strangest-looking elf she has ever met.  In Die Feder eines Greifs, the Indonesian characters assume he must be a jenglot.  Here, Alfonso comments that these little people look rather like the sprites who live in the avocado trees, only less green-skinned and without flowers growing out of their heads (an idea which Fliegenbein, not surprisingly, finds decidedly creepy).

Fliegenbein explains that they are homunculi, created by a man who also considered himself to be a wizard.  This is another touchy subject (at least for Fliegenbein, though not the endlessly enthusiastic Freddie), since their creator, unlike Alfonso, was definitely a Dark wizard.

Barnabas thanks Alfonso for helping them find such a perfect campsite to meet a dragon in, up in the mountains.  Alfonso explains that there are legends of giant flying lizards in the mountains of Veracruz - which is two thousand miles away, but at least evidence that dragons made it to the New World, though most dragons in American mythology tend to be giant serpents like Damballah, feathered serpents like Quetzalcoatl, or water-serpents like Kolowissi.  (PDB11, who is considering writing a How to Train Your Dragon meets Drachenreiter fanfic in which Hiccup travels around the world, says I'm getting way ahead of him in my research.  I hope he does write his story, but he says the difficult part is ensuring that it actually has a plot and isn't just a catalogue of dragon species around the world.)

In the meantime, Alfonso introduces a friend of his who is another fantastic being, a very unusual merperson.  Most merfolk, the author reminds us, are the colour of the oceans that they inhabit, but Elewese, like Lizzie Persimmons in the previous chapter, has a human-looking head, with long black hair and pale golden skin (even if it is covered in dark spikes).  Below the neck, he has a dozen starfish-arms – but he leaves human footprints on the sand, implying that his lower body, or perhaps just his feet, are human, which somehow seems weirder than a human-headed starfish.

As you can guess, Elewese, like Lizzie, was originally a human who was miraculously saved from drowning by being turned into a sea-creature.  Specifically, he is one of the members of the Chumash tribe who fell into the sea when trying to walk across a rainbow - but for some reason, when his friends were saved by being turned into dolphins, he was turned into a starfish instead.

Elewese promises his help in keeping ships and other humans away from the Aurelia.  Like everyone else in the sea, he has heard of her: ‘the great bringer of life – or of death, if she wishes.’

Before they leave, Ben notices a strange-looking spider scuttling across the sand which looks like a copper coin with legs.  Considering what we have heard about Kupfer’s experiments, this sounds highly ominous.