The novel's many allusions are drawn from broader sources as well.
Jacob, specifically, came through the Mirror the first time in search of his missing father, John Reckless, an engineer: he may meet him in a sequel volume, but perhaps he won't. Funke's greatest subversion of her folktale sources is the doubt that any of its characters will actually find what they are looking for. (Is this my fault? This is the persistent question haunting the four main characters: Jacob, Will, Fox, and Clara, Will's medical-student girlfriend, also from our world.)įunke's novel plays its Märchen-motifs both straight (gingerbread houses and seven-league boots on the concrete level young men who sally forth to "learn what fear is" on the thematic level) and crooked. Jacob has come to the perilous Mirrorworld many times and survived, but Will has made only one journey there, and it may result in something very like death for him.
(No, their first names are not a coincidence.) Both brothers were born into the world we know-twenty-first-century New York City-and have accessed the alternative-European landscape that is Fox's native land by the tradition-honored means of a magic mirror. Now, however, he is engaged in a race against time, attempting to counter a curse that has befallen his brother, Will. Prior to the events of the novel, Jacob has been employed, like the hero of "The Golden Bird," as a hunter of magical treasures for the nobility. Fox, a shape-shifting vixen-girl, yearns to upgrade her faithful-sidekick status to something warmer but is thwarted on two fronts: not only by the urgency of the quest she participates in but also by the impatience and self-centeredness of the book's questing hero, Jacob Reckless. Cornelia Funke's Reckless: Steinernes Fleisch-in which folktale tropes are subversively engaged to construct a postmodern narrative of siblings, parents, and young adult pair- bonding-features an incarnation of this animal-helper figure, perceived by many readers as the book's most sympathetic character, although she is not its titular protagonist.
The analogous assistant in Asbjørnsen and Moe's "Lord Peter" (AT 545B) is a cat this time she herself transforms into the human hero's true love at the story's end. While questing for treasures, the hero of the Grimm tale "The Golden Bird" (AT 550) enlists a fox helper, who turns out to be the enchanted brother of the princess who must be rescued.
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