Monday 25 September 2023

"I Capture the Castle" by Dodie Smith


Lewes Castle really does have a house built into it; you can see the shadow of the main keep.

This novel is coming-of-age story done in the form of an epistolary novel, written in the form of a journal, although a journal irregularly kept and with very long entries. This means that, despite being narrated in the first person by the protagonist and in the past tense, the reader never knows what the outcome might be . It enables the narrator to comment on the action (eg: "Dancing is peculiar when you really think about it. If a man held you hand and put his arm around your waist without its being dancing, it would be most important; in dancing, you don't even notice it - well, only a little bit."; 2.8) and it allows the reader to sometimes feel that they are 'one step ahead' of the narrator, such as when the reader realises that Stephen is (slavishly) in love with Cassandra before she does.

The book starts by describing the cast of eccentrics that make up the Mortmain family:
  • Father is the author of a critically successful experimental novel who now suffers from writer's block.
  • Step-mother Topaz is an ex-model, devoted to her husband, who loves sunbathing nude. Cassandra pokes fun at her for her art and for her consciously artistic views but Topaz holds the family together: "The real Topaz is the one who cooks and scrubs and sews for us all. How mixed people are - how mixed and nice!" (3.14)
  • Elder sister Rose hates being poor and is prepared to do anything for money, even proposing to become a prostitute or at least marry a rich husband.
  • Cassandra, the narrator, is a dreamer; she starts as a naive young girl and the book chronicles her passage to maturity.
  • Thomas, younger brother, is a schoolboy yet he can be very perceptive when necessary.
  • Stephen is the orphaned family retainer who lives with them and goes out to work and gives them all his money; he is desperately in love with Cassandra but he can't tell her because he feels inferior to her.
Minor characters include Miss Blossom, a dressmaker's dummy, who acts both as a source of maternal consolation to the sisters (Topaz, though fulfilling the role of a stepmother in all practical ways, could scarcely be called motherly) and acting as a sort of conscience and advisor to Cassandra.

They all live in a partially ruined castle in the poorest of circumstances. This is genteel poverty as depicted in so many Victorian books; they have zero income and they've sold their jewellery and most of their furniture ("All we really have enough of is floor."; 2.10) but it doesn't seem to occur to any of them (except the family retainer) to go out and work. Escape from their circumstances depends on Father starting work again, or marrying a rich husband, or living off the earnings of the one working-class member of the household. The local villagers also support and tolerate them in a quasi-feudal relationship. Not only is there no trace of feminism, the class complacency in this book, of penniless aristocrats nevertheless lording it over the uncultured but hard-working peasantry is staggering. Though, to be honest, this is another faithful reflection of the Austen oeuvre. 

A fanfiction mashup?
Towards the end of Chapter 2, the narrator, Cassandra, is discussing with her sister Rose, the re-opening of the nearby stately home and Rose’s desire to marry a man with money (almost any man) and they realise that they are in a position similar to the start of Pride and Prejudice. Rose wants to live in a Jane Austen novel and Cassandra would rather be in a Charlotte Bronte novel and they decide that 50% of each would be perfect.

Cassandra was the name of Jane Austen’s sister in real life.

Almost immediately after meeting the two (somewhat estranged) brothers who are the new owners of Scoatney Hall, Cassandra overhears prickly Neil and easy-going Simon discussing her and Rose in very unflattering terms; one warns the other about gold-digging girls. This is almost a copy of the scene in Pride and Prejudice where protagonist Lizzie overhears stand-offish Mr Darcy disparage her and her sisters to more easy-going Mr Bingley.

Cassandra’s father spends most of his time in the Gatehouse, reading, just like Mr Bennett spends most of his time in the library. But both fathers are perceptive and offer words of wisdom.

Stephen is a poor and stunningly handsome boy who is in love with Cassandra (she gets a funny feeling when she thinks of him but doesn’t think it’s love) and who works for the family (he lives with them and they exist on the wages he earns from the nearby farmer). He adores Cassandra but he knows his place. There is a wistful scene in chapter 7 when she tells him that “gentlemen are men who behave like gentlemen” and he replies that “you can only be a gentleman if you’re born one, Miss Cassandra”. Here are the makings of Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights (admittedly an Emily Bronte novel rather than Charlotte). Stephen is being tempted by a lady photographer to model for him and to act in the movies. Heathcliff, too, had to go away to become rich. Perhaps Stephen/ Heathcliff's return in a vengeful mood might form a sequel to this novel.

There's a hint, too, of Austen's Sense and Sensibility in which one sister thinks you should marry for money, but ends up marrying for love, and the other sister takes the opposite course. 

But if the set-up is a Bronte-Austen mashup, the development of the plot suggests alternative outcomes. Nevertheless, the open ending - which is foreshadowed: in chapter eleven Cassandra says that she doesn't really like "a novel with a brick-wall happy ending - I mean the kind of ending where you never think any more about the characters." - allows one to speculate on what the sequel might have been.

The least Austenish of the characters (except for Stephen, the Bronte intrusion) is Topaz. She's like Mrs Bennett only in the she conspires with Ruth to get her married to a wealthy man and that Cassandra pokes fun at her in the early stages of the novel. But there is a very real side to Topaz. Yes, she used to be a nude model (who still occasionally goes up to London to pose) but her daily life is the usual mother's grind of cooking and cleaning and mending clothes and her relationship with her husband becomes very real when she suspects that he might be committing adultery, if only in his mind. I thought Topaz was a super character who transcended all her stereotypes.


Selected quotes:
  • "I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring." (1.1)
  • "I told her that she couldn't go on the streets in the depths of Suffolk." (1.1)
  • "Anyone who could enjoy the winter here would find the North Pole stuffy." (1.3)
  • "The last stage of a bath, when the water is cooling and there is nothing to look forward to, can be pretty disillusioning. I expect alcohol works much the same way." (1.4)
  • "I know all about the facts of life. And I don't think much of them." (1.4)
  • "She was wearing her hand-woven dress which is first cousin to a sack." (2.7)
  • "Long prayers are like nagging." (2.8)
  • "I love owls, but I wish God had made them vegetarian." (2.8)
  • "This desire for solitude often overwhelms her at house-cleaning times." (2.10)
  • "How moons do vary! Some are white, some are gold,this was like a dazzling circle of tin." (2.10)
  • "As if our moat took any notice of sunshine! It is fed by a stream that apparently comes straight from Greenland." (2.10)
  • "Happy ever after ... What I'd really hate would be the settled feeling, with nothing but happiness to look forward to." (3.11)
  • "Surely it isn't normal for  anyone so miserably in love to eat and sleep so well? Am I a freak? I only know that I am miserable, I am in love, but I raven food and drink." (3.13)
  • "As I never gave the Church a thought when I was happy, I could hardly expect it to do anything for me when I wasn't. You can't get insurance money without paying the premiums." (3.13)
  • "I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness." (3.13)
  • "The Vicar and Miss Marcy had managed to by-pass the suffering that comes to most people - he by his religion, she by her kindness to others.  And it came to me that if one does that, one is liable to miss too much along with the suffering - perhaps, in a way, life itself. Is that why Miss Marcy seems so young for her age - why the Vicar, in spite of all his cleverness has that look of an elderly baby?" (3.13)
  • "I don't like the sound of all those lists he's making - it's like taking too many notes at school, you feel you've achieved something when you haven't." (3.15)
  • "No sunrise I ever saw was more beautiful than when the thick grey mist gradually changed to a golden haze." (3.16)
  • "Even a broken heart doesn't warrant a waste of good paper." (3.16)
A beautifully written page-turner with an eccentric cast, pervaded with a wry observational humour. Delightful. 

September 2023; 408 pages


This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God


Other books which have 'castle' in their title include:
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