From Cover to Cover: Howl's Moving Castle

Hello, and welcome back to From Cover to Cover! My monthly segment where I check out a book suggested by my readers and give my impressions of it. This month the suggestion comes from Heather, who has rather reluctantly suggested a couple of rather interesting titles that I am very excited about checking out. She's also mentioned perhaps suggesting some more Young Adult titles in future, which could be an interesting change of pace. I've not read any YA for quite some time, but from the outside looking in it seems there's a lot of exciting ideas brewing over there if nothing else! For this month though, we'll be covering something I only knew as an animated movie (and was greatly surprised to find it was an adaptation of a previous work) until it was suggested to me.

Howl's Moving Castle is a 1986 fantasy novel written by Diana Wynne Jones. It takes place in the land of Ingary, a place that is bound by magic and fairy tale logic. The main character, Sophie, is the eldest of three sisters - Meaning that by that very fairy tale logic, she is damned to attempt to seek her fortune and both fail the hardest and suffer the most for it. Just as she resigns herself to a quiet, dull life making hats it seems this prophecy suddenly comes true, when she inadvertently wrongs the Witch of the Wastes and is turned into a old crone. Disgruntled and distressed by this turn of events, Sophie flees the hat store she was due to inherit and manages to find herself on the bizarre, moving structure that is the castle belonging to the Wizard Howl. Despite Howl's fearsome reputation for eating young women's hearts, Sophie finds herself locked into a seemingly impossible deal to regain her youth, and must find a way to prove her worth to the Wizard while settling into a peculiar new life with the castle's other residents. 

Okay, before we even break into the contents - Can we stop a moment and just admire how beautifully put together that cover is? It's a wonderfully eye-catching piece, that you can go back too after you've read the book and continue to admire all the story elements that reside within it. I don't usually talk about covers in this segment, because of how region and edition specific they are, but that one is gorgeous. A quick glance at Wynne Jones' bibliography reveals that  many of her other books have covers that are just as wonderful (at least, attached to the UK editions I'm looking at), to the point I don't think I've seen such consistently good cover artwork for one author since Josh Kirby's beautiful work for many of Terry Pratchett's books.  

Cover aside, it's difficult to know where to begin with this one. On the one hand, Howl isn't exactly a meaty book. It's prose is far from complex, the ideas it presents are very in line with much of Neil Gaiman's work - In that it's attempting to tell a modern story, with fairy tale sensibilities - and it's a remarkably quick read. I picked it up early in the afternoon, and I finished it that very night. But I wouldn't really have it any other way. Howl is a delightful read, from start to finish, with many high points and only a few, perplexing moments that made me pause at the time, but in hindsight lock together nicely.  

I can not say enough wonderful things about the characters of this book. At the start of the book, the main character, Sophie is a defeatist who doesn't so much let people walk over her, but is so resigned to people walking over her that she doesn't really give them a choice but to walk over her. It's a negative trait that could have so easily been played up to form her one and only character quirk, and I'm sure other authors would have had her sulking around the hat shop, sighing dramatically, wondering aloud why she must be the one who suffers but Sophie never really sinks into unreasonable self pity. It's the difference between being resigned and miserable, Sophie is resigned to her fate as the eldest of three, but that just means she's willing to give up any dreams of her own happiness to do what she can to secure the happiness of others. It's akin to a parent giving up their plans for the future to raise a child, and it makes her very endearing from the start. 

Later on, when Sophie is turned into an old crone, her persona changes. She becomes stubborn, determined and wildly outspoken in the way old people are - She's still, at her core, that defeatist who truly believes as the eldest she's going to mess everything up - But being given a new identity, with only a handful of years to live if she doesn't regain her youth, many of Sophie's inhibitions are shed. Yet it feels natural. For all intents and purposes Sophie is an old woman, with all the problems and benefits that come with being one. It makes perfect sense that her change in circumstances would effect how she'd see the world, and it's a surprisingly nice touch that there is a shift to her mental as well as her physical axis, and it's all the nicer that it's done well. 

All the other characters, big and small, are given much the same care and attention. Calcifer is initially presented as a rather dangerous and potentially devious fire demon, ayet while his relationship with Howl is constantly in question, he's a surprisingly relatable and human character for not having any legs and not leaving the one spot for the entire novel. The same with sane, sensible Michael, Howl's apprentice. On the surface he's the only person with his head screwed on properly in the entire castle, however he has his own little secrets and despite the fact that at times he seems to be the only one holding Howl's operation together, can still get into a mood and slink off. Howl is perhaps the hardest character to pin down in the book, I want to argue that he eventually becomes the simplest, but there are things that happen towards the end of the book that give him a whole other layer so that wouldn't be fair. 

The point that I'm slowly snaking too is that every main character feels like a real human being, and is fun and engaging to read about. While the side characters are also given their own quirks and can sometimes surprise you by not quite being the people you either thought, or assumed, they were. In fact the characters with the least amount of characterisation going for them are the villains, who never seem to have quite the same presence as everyone else. Then again, given that villains in fairy tales never amount to much more than cackling, sneering vehicles for making the main character suffer, I can't help but feel this is intentional. 

I found the more general description in Howl to sometimes be a stumbling block. It often felt sparse and could sometimes be unclear and at times doesn't paint a hugely vivid picture of what the book is presenting to you. It didn't really sink in for me that the castle had the shape of a giant moving chimney until another, similar castle was mentioned later in the book, for example. There also seems to be a reluctance to really aggrandise anything, Wynne Jones chooses never to really make one area feel very special or 'magical', and very few people feel any grander or more special than those you might meet in real life. Yes, you're aware that Mrs. Pentstemmon is a formidable magician by reputation, but upon meeting her she's much more like a stern head mistress or a stately lady whose respect is not easily earned. This is something many of the witches share in common, making magic seem more like a craft, business enterprise or hobby than a mysterious art form that oozes allure. 

There's a certain charm to this though, that I really enjoyed. The fairy tale tropes and magical influences that would stand out like a sore thumb in our world, are just normal every day occurrences in this world, and going to apprentice for a witch is just as normal and sane a career path as going to work at a cake shop - Providing you're the right daughter for the job. I felt this grounded the land of Ingary, making it feel more familiar than most fantasy worlds. At times it felt less like a fairy tale kingdom and more like a stroll around a village fete. It also allowed the stranger, more quirky moments, such as Howl covering himself in slime or the battle between Howl and the Witch, to stand out more keenly against the backdrop without having to be overly grandiose to compete with how wonderful and fantastical the word is. 

Charm is definitely the right word to describe Howl in general. It's a very charming tale, that despite the descriptive passages that perhaps don't paint as vivid a picture as other authors would with their own, creates a very realistic and believable world and then fills it with fun, witty, enjoyable characters and just shouts 'Go!'. The story it tells is also fairly well sewn together, although there are times where you think you can see the threads showing. The first appearance of the Witch of the Wastes is very sudden, very jarring and makes little sense and there are other moments like that throughout the book that make you ponder if the author hit a wall and just threw something in to keep the story moving along. But to Wynne Jones' credit, her novel is much more well crafted than that, and things that are problematic at first are eventually given reason and explanation and they all satisfied me very well. 

The one thing that initially bothered me, and I thought would bring the whole thing unstuck, was the ending. It's very swift, and very convenient and features the culmination of something that perhaps had been bubbling a little too far below the surface to be obvious. So seeing it come to a resolution almost felt tacked on. However, I slept on it, and came to realise that unlike other endings that simply leave me thinking 'Is that really it?!' Howl's did at least tie everything up nicely, I know where these characters are going even if I didn't get to say farewell. 

Another thing struck me very quickly afterwards. Howl is, at it's roots, a fairy tale. It never really rubs this in your face by making very oblivious allusions to famous tales, or populating it's world with characters from them like some other works of fiction, but it weaves the tropes into it's setting rather nicely and when all is said and done once the magic spells or wicked curses have been undone, fairy tales do tend to rush to the end very quickly. It's what the phrase 'And they all lived happily every after....' is designed for. Think back to Beauty and the Beast and how much time we spend getting to know the characters, mapping every step of their journey, and when the curse is broken? Everyone is human again, sing us out Mrs. Potts! I can't help but feel that the ending is designed to mirror this, and even though there's a strong part of me who's grown to love these characters and wants to know more, those last few lines are just wonderful. They put a smile on my face, and were oddly touching, and if I can close a book smiling and touched I'd say it's a job well done.

So, we get down to the rating. Ultimately Howl's Moving Castle is a very charming story, with very memorable characters and a very positive theme that I realise I didn't talk about much above, but seems to touch on the majority of the characters. At it's core, Howl is about imprisonment and how we choose to cope with the things imprisoning us. This does not have to mean being physically trapped, although in some cases that certainly does apply, but also being free from the mental, emotional and societal bonds that things such as our birth, standing in the community or even we ourselves place upon us. Sophie lives under the rain cloud of being the third child, and much of her journey boils down to if it's right for her to accept that or not. Calcifer is physically imprisoned by the magics that he and Howl weaved together, but freedom in the conventional sense could mean his own death. Howl is perpetually on the run from anything that seeks to tie him down, yet at the same time often finds himself backed into a corner or in abject misery because of his own flaws and personality issues. Howl is, at it's heart, about how the characters choose to either hide, or overcome these things and it certainly made me think on the kind of barriers that I create for myself. 

With all this being said, I come to something I've often thought of since I started this section. What would a book worthy of a five monkey rating look like.  I always assumed I'd just know it when I saw it. Ultimately as I sit here, racking my brain for more to say, I can't think of many bad points to pin on this one. There are a few oddities in the E-book, with some rather lovely looking illustrations shrank down to thumbnail size while each chapter heading is bold, underlined, hyper-linked and takes up the whole page. But that's on the publishers head, and is more to do with presentation than the actual content of the book. I also found that UK publisher Harper Collins considers this a children's book, which I can see, as it's most definitely accessible to everyone. But at the same time, Wynne Jones takes far better care of her overall narrative and presents far more interesting characters and scenarios than most adult fiction. Much like The Graveyard Book is one of my favourite Gaiman works (and also worthy of a five come to think of it) Howl's Moving Castle  is a very solid book where the enjoyment gained makes what nit picky flaws there are instantly forgettable.

So you know what, I'm doing it. Howl's Moving Castle gets the full five out of five monkeys, and I'm very much hoping the follow-up Castle in the Air is able to cement Diana Wynne Jones as an author I can be genuinely excited about. 

That's all for this month, come back next month when I'll be  looking at Wes Craven's début novel The Fountain Society.