I Capture The Castle

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A musical adaptation with book and lyrics by Teresa Howard and music by Steven Edis received its staged premiere at the Watford Palace Theatre in April 2017. It was directed by Brigid Larmour. [6] I wish I knew of a way to make words flow out of father. Years and years ago, he wrote a very unusual book called Jacob Wrestling, a mixture of fiction, philosophy and poetry. It had a great success, particularly in America, where he made a lot of money by lecturing on it, and he seemed likely to become a very important writer indeed. But he stopped writing. Mother believed this was due to something that happened when I was about five.

Cassandra skillfully describes her father’s distance and failure to do anything to provide for the family, her stepmother’s charm and eccentricity, and her older sister Rose’s despair at their isolation and poverty. But what broke my heart was her matter-of-fact descriptions of how their poverty affects their lives every day: the too-small, worn-out clothing the girls have to wear; her gratitude for having eggs along with bread and margarine for their evening meal; the way the girls trade off sleeping in the one comfortable bed in their room (which hasn’t been sold only because it’s in such bad shape). Rose, the more beautiful sister, is grimly determined to escape from poverty, even if she has to marry a man she doesn't love. When two young American brothers move into town (the older son, Simon, is the family’s new and wealthy landlord), the Mortmains’ lives are all turned topsy-turvy, with love, romance and secrets. Cassandra keeps a diary, and at first it is mostly meandering observations on how poor they are and how hard everything is. Then Stephen finds a job as a model and the American owners of the castle show up.Perhaps part of the reason I resisted this book is that I came to it thinking it would be romance (because of the movie poster cover of the book, which says something like, "A well-loved classic that has become the most romantic movie of the year" - hate those movie poster covers), but it is actually, more than anything, a coming of age story. I say this because I think that whether you prefer coming-of-age or romance, it helps to know what you're getting into when you start a book. In my experience, romantic novels solve the problems of life by bringing characters together in true love. I Capture the Castle is written through Cassandra's eyes, so it does not rely on romantic satisfaction to tell the story, as, perhaps, it would have if it were told by another character in the same book. Rather, like any good coming of age story, develops through revelations of the unreliability of people around Cassandra and her discovery her own independence and capabilities. Cassandra does grow up during the year-long course of the novel, and the end, while somewhat overwrought with soap opera machinations, gives me hope she and her family will get through this and start taking care of each other again, but I've got a lingering uneasiness about the family dynamics. Her father shoves her against a wall and doesn't even apologize, and neither he nor Cassandra seem aware he's done anything wrong. This is not a sweet little pastoral look at the English countryside like I expected -- the "we're poor, but it's fun!" approach -- instead, it hides a sort of secret viciousness beneath the jovial front. The final lines of the book, as Cassandra fills the very last space and declares the journal forever finished, are a haunting chant, a throb of something so nebulous as to be ghostlike. “Perhaps it would really be rather dull to be married and settled for life. Liar! It would be heaven. It’s a melancholy, whimsical book about love and pain and growing up. Arch without ever seem insincere.

I Capture the Castle was a disappointment. The blurb had lead me to believe that I was going to experience the pleasures of living in a beautiful castle, steeped in history, with a charming story weaving in perfectly with that castle, lead by our narrator, Cassandra. Unfortunately, that isn't what I experienced. There was a lot I didn't enjoy about this book, but I'll start with the positive.Cassandra is fascinated by the Cottons and their American mannerisms, traditions and expressions, just as the Cottons are fascinated by the Mortmains and their English mannerisms, traditions and expressions. What does I Capture the Castle say about English preconceptions of Americans and America and vice versa?

Rose, his elder daughter, is lovely and self-centred, and is willing to sell herself to get out of her poverty; the younger daughter Cassandra is pretty, witty and intelligent and aspires to be a novelist. Their youngest sibling Thomas is fifteen and precocious like Cassandra. Their stepmother (the girls’ mother had died eight years before the story opens), who is only twety-nine and goes by the unusual name Topaz is a former artists’ model who worships the ground James treads on and sometimes communes with nature by dancing on the moors stark naked. Stephen Colly, the Mortmains’ maid’s son who has continued to stay with them even after her mother’s passing, makes himself useful about the house and is hopelessly in love with Cassandra.I have just remarked to Rose that our situation is really rather romantic—two girls in this strange and lonely house. She replied that she saw nothing romantic about being shut up in a crumbling ruin surrounded by a sea of mud. I must admit that our home is an unreasonable place to live in. Yet I love it. The house itself was built in the time of Charles II, but it was grafted on to a fourteenth-century castle that had been damaged by Cromwell. The whole of our east wall was part of the castle; there are two round towers in it. The gatehouse is intact and a stretch of the old walls at their full height joins it to the house. And Belmotte Tower, all that remains of an even older castle, still stands on its mound close by. But I won’t attempt to describe our peculiar home fully until I can see more time ahead of me than I do now. Personally, I can’t see how the iron could get very far into a man’s soul during only three months in jail—anyway, not if the man had as much vitality as father had; and he seemed to have plenty of it left when they let him out. But it has gone now; and his unsociability has grown almost into a disease—I often think he would prefer not even to meet his own household. All his natural gaiety has vanished. At times he puts on a false cheerfulness that embarrasses me, but usually he is either morose or irritable—I think I should prefer it if he lost his temper as he used to. Oh, poor father, he really is very pathetic. But he might at least do a little work in the garden. I am aware that this isn’t a fair portrait of him. I must capture him later. When he came out he was as nice a man as ever—nicer, because his temper was so much better. Apart from that, he didn’t seem to me to be changed at all. But Rose remembers that he had already begun to get unsociable—it was then that he took a forty years’ lease of the castle, which is an admirable place to be unsociable in. Once we were settled here he was supposed to begin a new book. But time went on without anything happening and at last we realized that he had given up even trying to write—for years now, he has refused to discuss the possibility. Most of his life is spent in the gatehouse room, which is icy cold in winter as there is no fireplace; he just huddles over an oil-stove. As far as we know, he does nothing but read detective novels from the village library. Miss Marcy, the librarian and schoolmistress, brings them to him. She admires him greatly and says “the iron has entered into his soul.”

And anyway,” she told Rose, “you’re the last girl to lead a hardworking, immoral life. If you’re really taken with the idea of selling yourself, you’d better choose a wealthy man and marry him respectably.” We both prayed hard, Rose the much longest — she was still on her knees when I had settled down ready to sleep. “That’ll do, Rose,” I said at last. “It’s enough just to mention things, you know. Long prayers are like nagging.”

Dodie Smith

I mean, it’s all very upper class white people problems. Oh no, we can’t afford our castle. Oh no, Rose is behaving in a socially awkward manner to an American. Oh no, we’re all in love with the wrong person. I remember writing down: are they all getting married at the end? And basically the book takes a rather Jane Austen like turn to being marriage obsessed, with a poor family (in this case actual poor, instead of relatively) trying to marrying into a richer one. In this conflagration Cassandra is becoming aware of her attractiveness to the boys in her vicinity. They have strong opinions about whether Cassandra and Simon Cotton ought to be together (they should not, Simon does not deserve Cassandra) and whether the 2003 movie adaptation was any good (it was not, young Henry Cavill was inspired casting for Stephen but everything else was nonsense). They have read I Capture the Castle and fallen under its immensely charming and slightly melancholy spell, and they know that everyone else who loves that book must be a kindred spirit. I thought there were just a few missteps in the story: the chain of unrequited love interests was pushing the boundaries of believability (woman wants boy, who loves girl, who loves another guy, who loves another girl, who loves…). I guessed one big reveal at the end fairly early in the story. Cassandra spends a chapter or two examining her views on religion and talking to the local vicar, and then never mentions it again, which made me wonder why it was included in the first place. Another of my “books about large homes, metaphorical or literal” (see also The Blue Palace) comfort reads.