Temple Cloud

Now we cut back to Lizzie, listening to the Aurelia’s song in the ocean trench.  She, like Ben, is wondering whether the Aurelia will bring back vanished species such as unicorns or three-headed dragons.  There is a three-headed dragon in another of Cornelia Funke’s novels, Igraine Ohnefurcht ( Igraine the Brave ) , who appears to be a related species to Lung, since she too lives on moonlight.  However, it hadn’t been confirmed whether they existed in the Drachenreiter universe – though, as PDB11 complains, part of what he finds implausible about the Drachenreiter series is that it is so thick with fantastic beings and yet hardly anyone notices their existence. However, I’m still wondering about the chronology of unicorn extinction here.   Lizzie remembers discussing with Barnabas (which must have been more than twenty years ago) whether the Aurelia might bring unicorns back, which implies that they were already considered extinct by then.   But in Drachen...

The next chapter continues the experiences of the Wiesengrund family in America, but from Fliegenbein’s point of view, as he wakes early the next morning.  Good.  I love Fliegenbein, and I love the friendship between him and Ben, and this is the first time in this book that they have had the chance to spend time together as just the two of them, while everyone else is still asleep.  Characteristically, as they go out into the pre-dawn, Fliegenbein is worrying about how many creatures here could eat him ( practically everything except the rabbits ) , while Ben is cheerful and optimistic. Of course, Fliegenbein has real reason to worry – quite apart from whether mundane predators like coyotes or raccoons might eat him, the Aurelia is not only big enough to pull down a ship, but powerful enough to cause him and all fantastic beings to cease to exist.   Ben senses his anxiety and tries to cheer him up, pointing out that they don’t achieve anything by worrying about thi...

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...