Date Finished: 19/06/2011
My Rating: 3.5/5
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. Actually, I write this sitting at my kitchen table and not in a sixpenny book, but on my slightly (although probably not all that much more) expensive laptop, however it's such a good opening sentence (and apparently one of the most memorable in 20th century fiction) to a novel that I just had to steal it.
Not so long ago I was chatting to a friend about books, and Dodie Smith came up in conversation. My friend (and I'm so sorry if you ever read this, Miss B!) said, 'oh, I love Dodie Smith'. I replied saying that I also loved Dodie Smith and my friend (somewhat haughtily) asked if I had in fact read anything other than 101 Dalmations. I hadn't. She scoffed and told me that I Capture the Castle was a brilliant book and made me feel that my love for 101 Dalmations was not quite good enough to claim a love for Dodie Smith generally. I had come across some literary snobbiness! I was very excited to see if I Capture the Castle would live up to my, now high, expectations. At this point, I would also like to say that Dodie Smith actually had a dalmation called Pongo. Finding this out made me very happy.
It turns out that I did thoroughly enjoy I Capture the Castle, although interestingly I felt that it was exactly the kind of book that Cold Comfort Farm parodies, despite CCF being published first. I think that my difference in scores with these two books is purely down to how much I liked the central characters (and that I didn't get the joke with Cold Comfort Farm!).
I Capture the Castle reads as the diary of 17 year old Cassandra Mortmain, and is divided into three sections, each written in a progressively fancier notebook. Cassandra and her family are desperately poor. Her father had written a rather remarkable novel around 12 years previously (something similar to Ulysses, which is on my list in about 5 books time... I'm already stressing about it!), and made some money from both the book and giving lecture tours in the USA. Following an unfortunate incident with a cake knife and a neighbour he spent some time in prison and had suffered from writer's block since then. All their furniture had been sold, and they were scraping by on what little they could get. Without spoiling the story too much, the family's landlord had died (not that they had paid him any rent for several years), and his American grandchildren had inherited his property, and the story tells of how their arrival into Cassandra's life results in changes for her and her family. Some people fall in love, some people don't fall in love, and I was very pleased to see that the book did not turn out as predictable as I expected. In other words, it was not necessarily the people I expected to fall in love that did. Dodie Smith had obviously thought long and hard about each character, and the book was true to each of them all the way through.
As I read the book, I fancied that I saw something of Cassandra in myself. Obviously not the poverty or lifestyle, but there was something about her outlook on life that I related to. I guess that anyone who acknowledges that the thought of eggs for tea may have contributed to them never having felt happier in their life is my kind of person.
So, who should read this book? Well, I think I'll be buying this for my nieces for Christmas (they're 13). I was slightly sad that I hadn't read it when I was that age, as it was exactly the kind of book that I loved back then. However, I will also be buying a copy for my 72 year old mum, as I am sure that she will thoroughly enjoy it too. It would seem that it's another one for the girls.
Next Book: The Twits, Roald Dahl.
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