Luka and the Fire of Life Book

When i embarked on this, i expected to like it just as much as i did "Haroun and the Sea of Stories", which was a solid 3 stars rating, due to it being a children's book and its kind of messy absurdness. i do like things to be absurd in a book, but not chaotical. there's a difference.

so, i had an already formed opinion about this. it was going to treat on about the same subject, continuing Haroun's story with that of his brother, Luka, in a magical world of their father's creation. Rashid is a storyteller, albeit a very good one, the only man who can make you live in his stories, and he stands for a simple principle: no matter what, tales shouldn't disappear from our world.

in here, Rashid is going to be taken away by Death, unless Luka, the smaller brother (he's 12, compared with Haroun, who is now about 30), manages to steal the Fire of Life and bring it back to his father. the only problem is - the Fire of Life is probably the best kept thing in the entire magical world, and its guardians are no normal powers, but the controlers of time themselves, Past, Present and Future.

let's move away from the plot, because it really is no more than that, and focus on the writing and the setting.

first of all, it felt different than "Haroun"... did. it was much more compact and sorted out, and a lot more appealing to a more mature reader. i can see the first one as a children's book more than i can consider the latter to be a part of the same category. there's a stylistic discrepancy that makes Luka stand out as a better crafted character and it affects on the world-building in better rather than worse ways. where in the first one you see Haroun motivated by the idea of saving the world by retrieving the stories, Luka here is firstly motivatrd by saving his father, so it reasons on a much more personal level with the reader.

for Haroun's world, i had a discussion with my history teacher if it would fit into the fantasy genre and i still stand strong behind the opinion that it does not. fantasy doesn't mean just weird creatures and other worlds, it means much more than that; it requires imitation, real-ness, personality and a ton of other traits that i was frankly unable to find in Haroun. just because it's a children's book with a few other wordly monsters in it, doesn't make it a fantasy story, is what i'm trying to say.

no, Luka got closer. not just from the register point of view, but as a whole. it was much easier to consider him a typical fantasy protagonist, as he was much more believable as a whole. or it might just be me reasoning with him differently, idk.

there's one more thing that i have to talk about, and it's the exact detail that made me give this book four stars and propelled it into the "i really like this" cloud. mythology!

i am in love with anything that's connected with ancient gods and their meanings, with their rise and fall and with their importance for a population at a certain time. i look at them with respect, not because i personally worship them, but because they are our own creations meant to redeem ourselves. i'm more bored with the single God that Christianity had than with the tens of Gods Ancient Greece had, or Egypt, or the Aztecs. they fascinate me because of their ... yes, absurdness! they are a product of imagination and interpretation and i think that's what makes them special.

during his quest to find the Fire of Life, Luka had to pass through a very different place in the magical world where all the forgotten Gods of our world resided, after humans discarded of them. you won't find no christian God, nor Al'Lah, nor Buddha, nor any other deity that is currently worshipped. instead, in this mistycal land, you might bump into Hermes, or Vulcan, you might get scared by Ra, who speaks in hierogliphs, or have a nice chat with one of the Japanese wind Gods. i mean, let's be clear, Luka meets with some of the only beings that managed to steal the fire from the Gods (they differ from culture to culture), the most important being the Elder, the Titan Prometheus, who stole fire for humans and suffered an eternity for it. (i'm still not sure how he got out of his chains on the mountain to come help Luka, but i was very happy and pleased when he showed up). that was, for me, the best part of the story. i believed it. no, actually. not only that i believed it on paper, i wished it were true. the sheer amount of mythological creatures involved in this little work is astounding and i think, gives it the special flare that separates it from "Haroun...".