I finished the trilogy! Now I have an Inkoverdose.
I’m definitely too old for it.
Also, I flipped through The Eagle Has Landed after a gap of approximately 10 years, and I now find Liam Devlin a most disagreeable character. 
Yup. I don’t think the Dustfinger comparison is apt. Actually now I’ve thought of another character that Dustfinger reminds me of – Caravaggio from The English Patient.
What I kept thinking as I read through this universe was: I’ve read too many books to be able to enjoy this as a child would. The Inkheart books would be wildly interesting to children who have not yet read some of the other famous books that the author does mention: The Once and Future King (TH White), His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman), and that master of all children’s series, Narnia (CS Lewis). Not to mention Joan Aiken and Madeleine L’Engle, and some of the books by Robert Louis Stevenson. But for someone who *has* read them…. the world of Inkheart becomes but a pale shadow of them, and of the Arthurian and Robin Hood legends recounted in the children’s compilations by Howard Pyle, Roger Lancelyn Green, and Sabine Baring-Gould, as well as the actual medieval troubadours of our own world.
I still like Dustfinger, though – an unusually adult character for a children’s book. Apparently the author based him partially on her own husband, and there’s a dedication to him at the beginning of the last book of the trilogy, Inkdeath. Something about the way it was phrased made me feel I should check – and Google confirmed that, sadly, he had indeed passed away just before Inkdeath was published. That’s very sad! Maybe this is a case of reality influencing the plot of the books more than most people know -while the books are not exactly sad or dark, there are passages speaking of the pain that a woman feels when she loses her husband, and much of the plot of the second and third books is constructed around circumstances of loss and pain. Yup. All books grew from real stories somewhere – real adventures and real pain. Presumably the best writers have gone through a lot of both.
Ultimately, the Inkheart trilogy is probably as good as they say (though not as well executed as it might have been with its good ideas). It’s just that I was spoilt for it by The Once And Future King, and the other books previously mentioned. Plus, I feel it’s a lot more long-winded than all of the above, largely through clunky phrasing alone – all three books could probably have been halved or at least three-quartered in length with some good editing, and the stories might have been more punchy. But it could simply be that it loses in translation from the German.
(I’ve just read customer reviews from Amazon.com, it turns out I’m definitely not alone in thinking that the series is very slow-moving and stylistically tedious at times, especially in the last book. But then again, considering sad events in the author’s life, I guess that’s not very surprising.)
And, to round off, here’s a good article about Paul Bettany.
