Wednesday, January 7, 2009

The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke

the thief lord was a delightful novel. it had all the right amounts of everything, suspense, romance, drama, action, adventure. fantastic. the characters were wonderful, funny, charming, irritating. there was a giant twist to the novel that really made it quite wonderful to me. definitely worth reading.

one thing this novel did extremely well was demonstrate the difference between childlikeness and childishness. to be childlike is to see the wonder in everything, to be simple and want only a few things: a place to sleep, some clothes, food, and a few comforts but more importantly someone to be loved and cared for by. the protagonists in this novel are children. they are simple, they see the world with a black and white sort of childlike pragmatism. their world is full of wonder--of course, it doesn't hurt that they live in venice. on the other hand, the antagonists are childish. some of these are children, but more often they are adults who are self-centered, stuck up, self-important, and arrogant.

scipio, the thief lord, is probably the most complex character. (spoiler warning!) his parents neglect him because they are too busy with more important things: business, money, ambition. he steals from them and uses the money to support the orphans and runaways he hides in his father's abandoned theatre. really, all he wants is to be loved and cared for but he finds neither love nor care from his parents. he feels like he's a pet to them: an interesting fixture to have in the house, one that can be trained to be entirely predictable and well behaved and will never be an inconvenience. his only friend at home is his cat but when the cat gets sick, his father won't even take the time out of his busy day to take the animal to the vet. scipio feels that his father is forever disappointed in him because he is not predictable, and refuses to be nothing more than a fixture. scipio's game of pretending to be the thief lord eventually shows itself to be nothing more than childishness and those who were fooled by his game feel betrayed by him. but in the end scipio learns the difference between childishness and childlikeness.

one of the antagonists is aunt esther hartlieb. she is entirely childish. she's selfish and self-absorbed. she wants a child who will look good on her, that's why she wants to adopt boniface and not prosper. to her, prosper would just ruin things. he's too fanciful, he's too old to be cute, and he has already learned too many bad habits. she seems to think that prosper's younger brother, boniface, who looks like a dear little angel with his blond hair and dimples, will make the perfect child because he looks so cute and he can be trained to behave himself, to act properly in front of her friends, like a pet dog and its repertoir of tricks: "ah, look how he eats with his knife and fork, without getting any spaghetti sauce on that crisp shirt." it turns out that boniface is nothing like that at all, but aunt esther's ambitions for him reveal her childishness. she even admits that she doesn't like children in general because they're unmanageable and don't care at all for what's really improtant. and what would be really important? well, apparently, that's business, money, and ambition. of course children don't care about those things! they haven't learned to be corrupt and jaded.

another character who demonstrates childlikeness is victor getz. victor works as a private detective. he likes his job mostly because he gets to dress up in different disguises. when he gets hired to hunt down prosper and boniface, he accepts the job because he needs the money. however, when he finds them, and realizes why they've run away from aunt esther, he decides to help them and all the other orphans and run aways that are hiding with them. throughout the novel, victor shows true childlikeness, whether its in his meek submission when the children kidnap him and tie him up and lock him in the bathroom for days or his childlike simplicity in the way he loves simple things like spitting off venice's many bridges. furthermore, despite being a cranky old man, he truly begins to love the children, not because they are cute or anything about what they look like or do but because of who they are. he loves them simply and completely.

i like the thief lord because it invites the reader to see the world with the simplicity of a child.

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