I Capture the Castle

 

I last read I Capture The Castle in 2020, when we were all in desperate need of comfort reading. This novel, though I came to it late in life, has cemented its place as one of my all time favourites -- perhaps THE favourite. Smith laboured over it for seven years and it is almost flawless.

There are so many delightful and poignant and agonising elements woven into this story -- the romance of the castle setting, the family's dire poverty, eccentric Topaz with her affected thrilling contralto and her practical good heart; the storybook romance with the painful twist; the absurd set-pieces, like when they all dye themselves green or when Rose is mistaken for a bear; the fully-formed side characters like the Vicar and Miss Marcy -- but what holds the whole thing together is Cassandra's narrative voice. In some ways she is a typical emotional, sensitive adolescent, in some ways a naive child, in some ways truly wise and thoughtful.

Someone dismissed this book as 'hardly high literature' but it's deceptive. There is actually a lot going on here, under the star-crossed lovers story -- about writing and creativity, about freedom and duty, about money and class, about England and romance.

I think I fall in love with I Capture the Castle a little more deeply each time I read it, and I'm sure that I will return to it again and again as the years pass.

Wandering With Intent

Wandering With Intent is the second book of Kim Mahood's that I've read, and I'd already come across a couple of these essays in the pages of The Monthly. Now the only one I have left is Craft For a Dry Lake, which was her award-winning first book. Mahood is an artist, writer and map maker who was born on a station in the Tanami Desert and grew up with First Nations people. Now she divides her year between living just outside Canberra and spending several months in a remote WA community.

Mahood has shrewd and compassionate things to say about white workers who land in these communities, filled with good intentions, and how they get worn down. She is subtle and insightful about working with elders to map Country, and the rich and wonderful things that can be achieved at the intersection between white and Aboriginal knowledges, when there is patience, respect and good will on both sides (it makes a nice change to read about some successes). She is also scathing about obstructive bureaucracy, and policies dreamed up in an office thousands of miles away. 

Mahood is about seventy, and she writes with wry good humour and perspective and anger and love about these people, her family. I can't wait to read her other book, and I only wish there were more.
 

The Dark Is Rising Revisited

 

These above are not my books. I do own three out of these five, with these covers, but I also have a single volume omnibus edition of the entire series, which I couldn't find an image of online. That omnibus was published in 1984, when I was eighteen, and you might have thought I would be growing out of middle grade fantasy, but my edition is soft and battered and very well-read, so I mustn't have been too old for it after all.

I re-read The Dark is Rising (volume two, as well as the name of the whole series) a few years ago, as part of a Twitter (RIP) Christmas Eve collective read-through, an enriching and delightful experience. But I haven't read the other titles in the series for years.

As a young teen, I absolutely adored these books, especially the mixture of the everyday and the high stakes magic that evolved once Will Stanton appeared, an eleven year old boy who is also the last of the powerful Old Ones. I loved the simple but potent symbolism of the Six Signs that Will is charged to collect, and the inchoate sea-power of the Greenwitch and its connection to Jane, the only real female protagonist. I loved the enigmatic figure of Merriman Lyon (Merlin), Will's mentor, and the solemn, serious battle between the Light and the Dark.

The last two books of the series, The Grey King and Silver on the Tree, always appealed to me the least, especially the final, climactic volume, where Will and Bran (King Arthur's heir) enter a strange magical city and perform various symbolic ordeals -- this was the point where, for me, the story lost its grounding in reality, and even though the children are left to carry on the fight against the forces of the Dark in our own world, the nature of that battle is left pretty vague (there's only one stand taken against racism, which I did appreciate, but it's mostly Will's brother who fights that battle, so any role the children might take is left largely undefined).

It did feel horribly apt to be reading The Dark is Rising while Trump was being re-elected in the US. It's pretty clear what the battles for us are going to be.