I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Krysta

February 8

Information

Goodreads: I Capture the Castle
Series: None
Age Category: Young Adult
Source: Library
Published: 1948

Summary

Seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain is determined to be a writer. To practice, she begins a journal chronicling life with her family in a crumbling castle. Her father once wrote a bestselling book, but now spends his days reading detective novels. Her stepmother Topaz previously posed for artists, but now tries her best to feed the family without any income. Her sister Rose is a beauty longing for romance but knowing she has no opportunity to meet men. And Stephen is the former servant's boy--still at the castle, working without wages because he's in love with Cassandra Cassandra's task is to capture them all as they are with a budding writer's eye.

Review

"Contemplation seems to be about the only luxury that costs nothing."

I Capture the Castle defies easy description, at least in terms of plot. What happens, perhaps, matters not so much as how Cassandra tells it. The joy of the story is in her self-aware observations and her desire to live life to the fullest, foregoing easy pleasures if it means experiencing emotion more powerfully. At times, she might come across as oddly precocious, or oddly young. I don't know. She's seventeen, yet treated as a child by her family and friends, who are mostly, admittedly, not very grown-up themselves. But still her voice comes across with power, urging readers to listen, urging them to accept her as she is, flaws and all.

Were it not for Cassandra's incisive narrative voice, I fear that the story might actually come across as absurd. Her father is a supposed genius, but he has not written a book for years and now avidly avoids his family and his failure by reading detective novels all day in a locked room. Her stepmother has a bohemian flair, having posed as a nude model and still having a propensity to wander nude through the hills to commune with nature. Her sister Rose mostly seems desperate for money and marriage, and thinks the best way to get them is to act like a caricature of a coquette in a Jane Austen novel. Their servant boy Stephen has the looks of a Greek god, but actually pays the family to work for them instead of the other way around, because none of the Mortmains apparently has enough talent, wits, or shame to actually get a job and feed themselves. One's feelings towards the family swing through a range of emotions: horror, secondhand embarrassment, sympathy. Cassandra fortunately possesses the wit and the skill to depict them all as more wounded than pathetic, and lovable all the same.

Some readers and critics seem to have found Cassandra charming, but, for me, the charm is in how selfish she can be--but self-aware of her faults at the same time. It seems important, since she wants to be a writer, that her observations do not shy away from the less pleasant aspects of being human. She knows Stephen is in love with her, but does nothing to stop encouraging him--possibly because she is happy to rely on him financially and emotionally. She admits her jealousy of her sister at times. She writes candidly about her betrayals and her moments of weakness. I don't know that Cassandra seems particularly good or kind--she, unlike her stepmother or the local librarian, never seems to do any problem solving to help others and she specifically decides not to volunteer with the local children when asked. Most of her days are spent writing and her portraits are not all flattering (or, as she will slowly come to realize, fully accurate). But, the author wants us to know, she's only a child (if seventeen--so, actually, I disagree with this).

Still, it is this keen self-awareness that makes her a character readers will want to root for. Because Cassandra is not all flaws, of course, only human. She can recognize sublime beauty when she sees it. She knows the world is full of romance, even when one is poor and living in a damp castle. She has a love for the English countryside and for her home that seems almost visceral. And, most importantly, she is too true to herself to ever really do something permanently small and mean. In some ways, this makes the ending of the book unsatisfactory. In other ways, it makes the ending of the book inevitable.

At times, the quirky family may seem unbelievable and the entangled romances that emerge later in the story seem to verge almost on comedy. Ultimately, it is the narrative voice that drives the story, making the family feel more alive than cartoonish and the romance feel more gripping than absurd. I Capture the Castle is a book quite unlike any other, difficult to describe as it moves from the carefree days of childhood to a Mrs. Bennett-like obsession with marriage to a more sorrowful maturity. It is, undoubtedly, however, a narrative experience.