Another novel (this time much-loved) which relates the story of a family struggling to live in genteel poverty. This time in the inter-war, as opposed to post-war years.
Jessica Duchen in The Independent on Sunday wrote; "In the mid-1930s Cassandra Mortmain, aged 17, keeps a diary of her family's impoverished life in a crumbling Suffolk castle. The daughter of a failing author, with an elder sister determined to marry money to rescue the family from its penniless rut, she captures the castle and its eccentric inhabitants with phrases that tie an instant reef-knot round the reader's attention. This isn't just a book; it's a world, and to read it is to live in it.
Yet the author of this remarkable work wasn't a young girl experiencing initiation into love and lust, pain and champagne ("like very good ginger ale without the ginger"), but a woman in her forties, living in Hollywood and feeling desperately homesick for England. You can see why Hollywood wanted her: she has delivered perfect structure, with settings and characters so thoroughly created that you seem to breathe their air. And the book isn't really for "young adults" at all. It's brimful with emotional and erotic subtlety, which Smith allows to shine through without hammering it home. The story is about unrequited passion – but even when Cassandra notices that she is part of "a game of second-best" in which everyone is seeking consolation after failing to win true love, she never quite lets her feelings interfere with her sense of irony.
Amid all the lyricism and liveliness, you notice that though this all goes on just before the Second World War, the characters live in blissful unawareness of the future. Smith, writing in the late 1940s, knew what lay in store; we share only her unstated hindsight. Was she deliberately preserving images of a pre-war world that she knew was gone for good?
 |
| All stills from the 2003 film. |
Whatever the truth, I Capture the Castle has that elusive quality: a heartbeat of its own. The open ending and its last haunting words keep on pulsing when you close the cover – and when you turn back to the beginning to start again.