Pan's Labyrinth by Guillermo Del Toro & Cornelia Funke

Author : Guillermo Del Toro & Cornelia Funke
Title : Pan's Labyrinth
Published : 2019
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Pages : 320
Genre : Fantasy / Horror

      You shouldn't come in here. You could get lost. It has happened before. I'll tell you the story one day, if you want to hear it. In fairy tales, there are men and there are wolves, there are beasts and dead parents, there are girls and forests. Ofelia knows all this, like any young woman with a head full of stories. And she sees right away what the Capitan is, in his immaculate uniform, boots and gloves, smiling: a wolf. But nothing can prepare her for the fevered reality of the Capitan's eerie house, in the midst of a dense forest which conceals many things: half-remembered stories of lost babies; renegade resistance fighters hiding from the army; a labyrinth; beasts and fairies. There is no one to keep Ofelia safe as the labyrinth beckons her into her own story, where the monstrous and the human are inextricable, where myths pulse with living blood ...

     Like so many others I came to this book having been a great fan of the film for the longest of times. In fact, the trilogy of films this comes from, are some of my favorite of all times. Del Toro has an amazing knack for creating dark fairy tales in the vein of the original brothers Grimm. They are there to teach us of life's perils and if we look hard enough there is a little magic to be found even in our own mundane world. Whilst, for the most part, I tend to shy away from fantasy as a genre there is something in the works of Guillermo Del Toro that will always capture my attention. 

     If you have not had the pleasure of enjoying this film then there is something very wonderful awaiting you. This is a story brought to us by two writers, that of the original hand and expanded by Cornelia Funke. At first glance, this is a tale of a princess who became lost from her own world. She spent too long among the humans and forgot her way home. It is this world that encroaches on ours peeks out of the dark cracks in search of a lost girl and a way to bring her home. On the flip side, this is a story of a war that is greatly forgotten by people outside of Spain.  How a violent dictatorship rose to power killing and torturing main on its path. It is within this duality that Pan's Labyrinth finds its wings and delivers a very dark but also hopeful story. 

     For its part, the book contains all the events that take place in the film. We say how Ofelia has to struggle with moral questions that would tax if the most mature of adults. How is it that we come to pick a side in such matters. Is it the moral compose of those in our lives that have come before. Do they teach us how to make choices when we think we have none? Or are we in fact guided by something deep inside our selves? For Ofelia, this is a battle between her mother, step farther, and the mysterious Faun. And whilst some of there motives seem very obvious to the reader others would appear to be far murkier. 

     Ther is a great deal of wounded to be found within the pages of this book. It is a land like our own but with magic to be found around every corner. This is however not the magic of some sort of sugar-sweet Disney land. Or for that matter the sensibility of a world like Harry Potter. Pan's Labyrinth is dark and brutal and the more time you spend with it the more you start to question whether anyone will make it out alive. It is a world I do truly love to spend time with. I was a little afraid that I would however not be able to get anything new from a story I have watched so many times before. But it is with thanks to Funke that this world gets to become bigger and more complex. We get to see why these lands have become so cursed and just what lurks in the heart of the Faun. Supplementing this are some truly beautiful illustration that only goes to enhance your experience. 

     This is a book that I can happily suggest to all, it contains so much that it feels like it is trying to jump off the page just to free up more space for its self. It is a book that reminds you of when you first heard of the creatures that lurk in the shadows. And that need for a hero however unlikely to rise up and shine a light in the darkest of hours