The castle continues to move
Feb. 17th, 2023 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustI was taken by surprise, a week or so ago, by a big bright advertisement filling the whole of the back page of my newspaper. I don't usually register the kind of ad that shows a model gazing off into the middle distance, but this one had the words "Howl's Moving Castle" right across the top. "Oh, yes," said durham_rambler as if this was the most natural thing in the world, "they are all through the paper." They were, too: Loewe were spending a lot of money to promote their collaboration with Studio Ghibli on a range of Howl-themed clothing and accessories.
I find this utterly mystifying. But it did serve to jog my conscience over a long overdue post-in-progress which I have been promising (if only to myself) ever since Steepholm's talk about the film adaptation set me re-reading the three books in which the wizard appears.
This re-read set me thinking about two things, one very general and one very specific. The general one is that no-one does sequels like Diana Wynne Jones. I know there are readers who always want more about their favourite characters, and I'm not saying I don't ever want that: but if I've enjoyed a book, I'm curious to know what else the author is going to do. With DWJ, it's always the unexpected. Take the Chrestmanci series - if 'series' is the word for a collection of narratives with different characters, set in different worlds (and where the nearest thing to a conventional sequel is actually a prequel). And don't get me started on Dalemark...
Castle in the Air takes a very literal view of what it means to be a sequel to Howl's Moving Castle. The first identifiable character to recur from the earlier book is not any of the people, but the castle itself: "the sky was deep blue with just one cloud standing peacefully in it. Morning was still flushing the cloud red and gold, giving it the look of a high piled castle with golden windows." Abdullah's habit of daydreaming, of building "castle[s] in the air" - the phrase appears on the first page of the narrative - makes it possible to take this at face value. But a reader who has picked up the book because the publisher describes it as a sequel may grasp at even this faint echo of familiarity. The characters so far seem entirely unfamiliar, and the setting is far away from Ingary, known by a completely different name (and the source of a rare tufted floral carpet); the Arabian Nights flavour suggests and entirely different kind of magical adventure. When Howl and Sophie eventually do appear, they are heavily disguised. But a castle, a castle which is recognisably not tethered to the ground, surely this is our old friend...
For the sake of completeness, since this post is supposed to be about both sequels to Howl's Moving Castle, I should confess that I don't have much to say about House of Many Ways. I knew that I had read "the third book of the trilogy" but I had no recollection of the story, couldn't even remember what it was called and, when I went looking for it on the bookshelves, blanked it completely. House of Many Ways? Wasn't that one of the later Chrestomanci stories? (Yes, apparently I need to re-read those, too.) When I read it, I could understand how this had happened: it didn't appeal to me much. If it hadn't been by DWJ, I would have said it was dull. There's a fair amount of slapstick comedy front and centre, which is not to my taste - but then, there's a fair amount of slapstick comedy in Howl (the bathroom, the effect of Sophie's magic on Howl's wardrobe) and I'm fine with that - there's enough other stuff to keep me on board. So, for the record, House of Many Ways delays introducing its recurring charaters, and when they do turn up, it is Sophie who steps forward. Howl himself comes later, and when he does appear he is heavily disguised: he is clearly having fun, but, rather less clearly, he is also doing his job, within the restrictions of professional etiquette. The action takes place in a kingdom much like Ingary, but, crucially, not Ingary but its neighbour: the royal wizard is not Howl but the absent, ailing Great Uncle William. It occurs to me as I write this that Great Uncle William's house, the eponymous House of Many Ways, is like the moving castle in that it connects many different places - a sort of family resemblance between wizards' houses. The result is a more conventional sequel than Castle in the Air - and perhaps that's one of the reasons I like it less...
Sequel or no, Castle in the Air reminded me less of Howl's Moving Castle than of two other books. One of them was no great surprise, but the other...
Abdullah's daydreams, his "castle in the air" is a sustained and detailed narrative of his own, entirely imaginary, history. His father is not really his father, but found him lost in the desert: "Abdullah could picture every nightmare inch of the dry, thirsty, footsore journey he had made..." But when he finds himself adrift in the desert, he realises all the ways in which his fantasy failed to account for the sheer realness of reality: the heat, the sand, the difficulty of steering by the sun. Living a fantasy narrative is harder than the stories make it seem, a theme that DWJ went on to explore in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. It is implicit in every fantasy she wrote, and it's no surprise that she is already toying with making it explicit here.
What did surprise me, and I'm still not sure how much this is all in my mind, was that as Abdullah's travels continued, I found myself thinking of Candide. Obviously, DWJ knew Candide: she wrote in her essay about Fire and Hemlock, The Heroic Ideal:
and in a sense that is precisely what is happening to Abdullah. He is far from stupid, but he has daydreams which are illusory, and his narrative is a constant process of discarding those and taking action in his own real life.
That's not what struck me, though: as I said in my original post, it was whatsteepholm said about Miyazaki's translation of the land of Ingary, which she associates with England, into a sort of fairytale central Europe: she compared a screenshot from the movie with a photograph of Riquewihr. This is not the landscape in which Castle in the Air opens, but the minute the narrative abandons the Arabian nights for a country inn, and Abdullah meets the Strangian soldier, I thought of Candide adrift in Europe and beyond, and the many friends he makes, and loses, and finds again, along the way. If a picaresque novel is one whose only narrative threat is to follow its protagonist from adventure to adventure, then Castle in the Air is not strictly a picaresque novel, for it has a carefully constructed plot in which princesses are rescued and prophecies fulfilled. But this is only revealed at the end of the book, when all the disguises are discarded: up to that point, the narrative meanders, as Abdullah's search for Flower-in-the-Night encounters one delay after another, and the band of travellers gains new members. It certainly feels like a picaresque novel.
Nonetheless, I had had pretty much convinced myself that this comparison was all in my own mind, when I reached the end of the book. Howl and Sophie live in the moving castle, and continue to quarrel, which is their way of being happy. Abdullah and Flower-in-the-Night also live happy ever after, though they are not reconciled with her father, and their happiness is not of the palace-and-half-of-my-kingdom variety:
"Cela est bien dit, répondit Candide, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin."
durham_rambler as if this was the most natural thing in the world, "they are all through the paper." They were, too: Loewe were spending a lot of money to promote their collaboration with Studio Ghibli on a range of Howl-themed clothing and accessories.I find this utterly mystifying. But it did serve to jog my conscience over a long overdue post-in-progress which I have been promising (if only to myself) ever since Steepholm's talk about the film adaptation set me re-reading the three books in which the wizard appears.
This re-read set me thinking about two things, one very general and one very specific. The general one is that no-one does sequels like Diana Wynne Jones. I know there are readers who always want more about their favourite characters, and I'm not saying I don't ever want that: but if I've enjoyed a book, I'm curious to know what else the author is going to do. With DWJ, it's always the unexpected. Take the Chrestmanci series - if 'series' is the word for a collection of narratives with different characters, set in different worlds (and where the nearest thing to a conventional sequel is actually a prequel). And don't get me started on Dalemark...
Castle in the Air takes a very literal view of what it means to be a sequel to Howl's Moving Castle. The first identifiable character to recur from the earlier book is not any of the people, but the castle itself: "the sky was deep blue with just one cloud standing peacefully in it. Morning was still flushing the cloud red and gold, giving it the look of a high piled castle with golden windows." Abdullah's habit of daydreaming, of building "castle[s] in the air" - the phrase appears on the first page of the narrative - makes it possible to take this at face value. But a reader who has picked up the book because the publisher describes it as a sequel may grasp at even this faint echo of familiarity. The characters so far seem entirely unfamiliar, and the setting is far away from Ingary, known by a completely different name (and the source of a rare tufted floral carpet); the Arabian Nights flavour suggests and entirely different kind of magical adventure. When Howl and Sophie eventually do appear, they are heavily disguised. But a castle, a castle which is recognisably not tethered to the ground, surely this is our old friend...
For the sake of completeness, since this post is supposed to be about both sequels to Howl's Moving Castle, I should confess that I don't have much to say about House of Many Ways. I knew that I had read "the third book of the trilogy" but I had no recollection of the story, couldn't even remember what it was called and, when I went looking for it on the bookshelves, blanked it completely. House of Many Ways? Wasn't that one of the later Chrestomanci stories? (Yes, apparently I need to re-read those, too.) When I read it, I could understand how this had happened: it didn't appeal to me much. If it hadn't been by DWJ, I would have said it was dull. There's a fair amount of slapstick comedy front and centre, which is not to my taste - but then, there's a fair amount of slapstick comedy in Howl (the bathroom, the effect of Sophie's magic on Howl's wardrobe) and I'm fine with that - there's enough other stuff to keep me on board. So, for the record, House of Many Ways delays introducing its recurring charaters, and when they do turn up, it is Sophie who steps forward. Howl himself comes later, and when he does appear he is heavily disguised: he is clearly having fun, but, rather less clearly, he is also doing his job, within the restrictions of professional etiquette. The action takes place in a kingdom much like Ingary, but, crucially, not Ingary but its neighbour: the royal wizard is not Howl but the absent, ailing Great Uncle William. It occurs to me as I write this that Great Uncle William's house, the eponymous House of Many Ways, is like the moving castle in that it connects many different places - a sort of family resemblance between wizards' houses. The result is a more conventional sequel than Castle in the Air - and perhaps that's one of the reasons I like it less...
Sequel or no, Castle in the Air reminded me less of Howl's Moving Castle than of two other books. One of them was no great surprise, but the other...
Abdullah's daydreams, his "castle in the air" is a sustained and detailed narrative of his own, entirely imaginary, history. His father is not really his father, but found him lost in the desert: "Abdullah could picture every nightmare inch of the dry, thirsty, footsore journey he had made..." But when he finds himself adrift in the desert, he realises all the ways in which his fantasy failed to account for the sheer realness of reality: the heat, the sand, the difficulty of steering by the sun. Living a fantasy narrative is harder than the stories make it seem, a theme that DWJ went on to explore in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. It is implicit in every fantasy she wrote, and it's no surprise that she is already toying with making it explicit here.
What did surprise me, and I'm still not sure how much this is all in my mind, was that as Abdullah's travels continued, I found myself thinking of Candide. Obviously, DWJ knew Candide: she wrote in her essay about Fire and Hemlock, The Heroic Ideal:
No respectable writer dared for centuries to write a straightforward heroic narrative. If you wanted to, you had to show that your narrative had a purpose that was not heroic — either to strip the illusions from a naive hero like Candide or Tom Jones...
and in a sense that is precisely what is happening to Abdullah. He is far from stupid, but he has daydreams which are illusory, and his narrative is a constant process of discarding those and taking action in his own real life.
That's not what struck me, though: as I said in my original post, it was what
steepholm said about Miyazaki's translation of the land of Ingary, which she associates with England, into a sort of fairytale central Europe: she compared a screenshot from the movie with a photograph of Riquewihr. This is not the landscape in which Castle in the Air opens, but the minute the narrative abandons the Arabian nights for a country inn, and Abdullah meets the Strangian soldier, I thought of Candide adrift in Europe and beyond, and the many friends he makes, and loses, and finds again, along the way. If a picaresque novel is one whose only narrative threat is to follow its protagonist from adventure to adventure, then Castle in the Air is not strictly a picaresque novel, for it has a carefully constructed plot in which princesses are rescued and prophecies fulfilled. But this is only revealed at the end of the book, when all the disguises are discarded: up to that point, the narrative meanders, as Abdullah's search for Flower-in-the-Night encounters one delay after another, and the band of travellers gains new members. It certainly feels like a picaresque novel.Nonetheless, I had had pretty much convinced myself that this comparison was all in my own mind, when I reached the end of the book. Howl and Sophie live in the moving castle, and continue to quarrel, which is their way of being happy. Abdullah and Flower-in-the-Night also live happy ever after, though they are not reconciled with her father, and their happiness is not of the palace-and-half-of-my-kingdom variety:
The house they had built was quite modest: it even had a thatched roof. But their gardens soon became on of the wonders of the land.
"Cela est bien dit, répondit Candide, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin."
