I Capture the Castle

For years I have come across references to the book I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (who is better known to many as the author of One Hundred and One Dalmations). It's supposed to be a classic coming-of-age book with comedic and romantic overtones, set in the English countryside.  When I saw a blog post about a line in How I Live Now being "borrowed" from Smith's classic 1949 novel, I thought that perhaps now is the time to give it a whirl.

It is charming, and certainly has overtones of Austen and Brontë, and maybe even more of stories like A Room with A View. Gentlewomen living in reduced circumstances, whose only hope for the future may be to make a good marriage. But the storytelling bored me after a while, as much as I enjoyed the characters and the overall tone of the book, I just couldn't quite keep going.

Still, my fond recollections of A Room With A View made me look for the DVD of the 2003 movie version to see how the story ends up. It actually reminded me more of the J. Geils song, "Love Stinks:"

You love her
but she loves him
And he loves somebody else
you just can't win

There are three young men and two young women, and none seem quite able to connect with the ones who they want to or ought to, and there's even a hint of love intrigue among the parental set as well. I loved Topaz (the stepmother) as played by Tara FitzGerald even more in the movie than in the book. She's sort of nuts in an artsy way, but manages to keep the character very genuine. But Romola Garai, who plays the central character and narrator Cassandra, really drives the story. The humor is the book is largely visual, and it worked for me better in the film than it did in the book, where I found some of the pivotal scenes a bit confusing.

How I Live Now

Finally got around to reading How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff to see what all the buzz is about. I am very conflicted about this one.  I can certainly see how it's found its passionate followers, and I definitely enjoyed it. I went back and forth about the way the author did the dialog, without any quotation marks, using odd capitalization, etc. I guess it made the narration more authentic and put less of a distance between the reader and the story.

But that is getting into the details before I even touch the heart of the story. I admit to being both intrigued by and shaken by books that have catastrophic events in the current or not-too-distant future -- the other one that comes to mind is Life as We Knew It. I couldn't even finish its sequel, The Dead and the Gone. I think that the parent side of me has a really hard time reading something that could reflect my child's future. When you read stories set in the past, say during World War II, we know that the war did end, or you can have some hope that we won't repeat some of these horrors, even if that's not what history seems to tell us. But when I read stories that could happen in the future, I get bogged down in the fear of what could come in the future for my own child. It seems strange in a way that the fictional stories are more frightening to me than the true stories, given how awful some of those true stories are. Of course, one of the books I just read was Never Fall Down, which is full of gruesome wartime events. But you know going in that the main character, whose life the story is based on, lives. And in the course of the book he has such an incredible ability to rise above things. He says several times that he was lucky, but I think his story is an example of someone who really made his own luck.

Back to How I Live Now.  Of course elements of it remind me a lot of all those British orphan stories -- or stories in which adults play only the most peripheral roles: the kids figure all sorts of things out on their own, deep in the English countryside in a verdant, timeless setting. It also made me think of Numbers, which has a love story between troubled teens crashing through British villages and fields, escaping from adults who don't understand them, against a backdrop of fears of international terrorism. It also made me reflect back on Goodnight Mister Tom. The latter is a modern-day classic in England but not well known in the states. It is set during WWII and involves a young boy who is sent out of London to the relative safety of the country. It turns out that the real threat to the boy is not the bombs being dropped by the Germans but his twisted mother. So he is fleeing bad family relationships like Daisy, going to the English countryside where he discovers sanctuary, more from the relationships he builds than from the place itself.