Wonder and Menace of a Fantasy Trip

Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones (Greenwillow: $10.95 reinforced trade edition)

This very unusual fantasy for not-so-young children recently shared with a novel of my own the ambiguous honor of being a runner-up for an important British literary prize, so I confess to having had a predisposition to read it sympathetically. And I was not disappointed.

Its delightful heroine is Sophie, the eldest of three daughters and therefore inevitably destined to make a mess of everything, for who ever heard of the eldest succeeding? Success--in fairy tales at least--is reserved for the youngest. That’s what Sophie believes, anyhow. She seems to accept, as philosophically as she accepts a great many of her other trials, that she has been born into a fairy tale era and to a fairy tale destiny.

And why not? Witches and wizards are as commonplace in her otherwise very ordinary little town as its hat shops, schools and romantic intrigues. The wicked Witch of the Waste is rumored to be around to resume her reign of terror after a lapse of 50 years. Howl, one of the wizards, closes in with his moving castle, which floats ominously above the rocks and heather, circling the town. Howl is reputed to suck the souls out of young girls, yet it is to his mysteriously mobile abode that Sophie repairs after the Witch of the Waste has laid on her a peculiarly horrible spell: She has become an old woman.

Having gained entrance to this wonderful and menacing pile, Sophie proceeds to make herself indispensable to the three inhabitants: wizard, sorcerer’s apprentice and Califer, a rascally but lovable fire demon. In the end, without yielding any of her own principles or personality, she purges the evil spells out of all of them.

Fascinating Castle

The castle itself is very much a character in the story, and its interior becomes, little by little, as familiar to the reader as his own home. From Howl’s disgracefully neglected bedroom (which reminded me of my teen-age sons’) to the spell corner, the broom cupboard and the grate that houses Califer, I could draw a plan of it. The most fascinating item is the door, which opens onto several different places and even times, for Howl has a number of secrets, one of which is a deliciously mundane connection with a very modern and down-market Welsh family. But nothing is quite what it seems, and the Welsh schoolmarm Howl falls for has a sinister alter ego.

This is a very long book that makes no concessions to a young--or even middle-aged--reader’s impatience to come to the exciting bits. But the reward for perseverance lies in this sense of living a fantastic reality with Sophie. All disbelief is suspended.

I believed in Sophie’s prematurely old bones (the evocation of age is very well handled and might perhaps make young readers a little more empathic with the process); in the zip of the passage of air and space experienced while striding in seven-league boots; in the skull that “yatters” its teeth; in the dreadful scarecrow that keeps trying to get in. All this and many richnesses besides will lurk in my memory for a long time.

Alarms and Excursions

If I have a criticism, it is that Sophie tends to take all the alarms and excursions a little too calmly. But after all, she is the eldest of three, which means she has learned to expect the worst.

I thoroughly recommend this book to readers of that persevering and imaginative temperament that will make them delight in Dickens and Tolstoy one day.