Howl's Moving Castle

"So most people probably have a relationship with Howl’s Moving Castle because of the Studio Ghibli movie, and that is absolutely 100% acceptable. I aspire to write how Studio Ghibli movies feel and look! Nobody in the world can animate food like Studio Ghibli, every little detail looks so intricate. It might be weird to say, but that’s how I want my books to feel: the way Studio Ghibli animated food looks. But Howl’s Moving Castle the book is a really different thing from the film. In the film, Howl is this mysterious, moody guy, this wizard in his moving house. In the book, he’s kind of a dick. I love that about him – I love how there’s these two different sides of him. Then Sophie comes in, and is such a beautiful, fully-realized character. And then don’t even get me started on Calcifer! Calcifer is the fire from the fireplace. When I wrote a book called In the Lives of Puppets , the family is made up of a Roomba vacuum with social anxiety and a medical nursing machine who’s a bit of a sociopath. I feel like I can give those kinds of side characters life because of what Diana Wynne Jones did with her side characters. But Sophie is the protagonist, a girl who comes into the house. You root for her. You want her to break down Howl. Howl’s a bit of a fuckboy in the book. He is such a weasel. It reminds me a bit of the Disney movie Beauty and the Beast with the back and forth, only Howl is the cool kid who knows he’s cool—but probably isn’t as cool as he thinks he is. I love the push and pull between all of them. Howl’s Moving Castle made such an impression on me when I read it for the first time, because I realised: This is what fantasy can be! This was in the 1980s and 1990s, when all the fantasy covers were big buff men holding swords, or wizards with lasers shooting out of their hands, and then you have Howl’s Moving Castle . It’s absolutely tremendous. It’s the first of a series, there’s multiple books, but this first one will always be my favourite. I read it as a kid, and I reread it once every couple of years. Nobody could write that kind of book like she did. Books like The Last Unicorn by Peter Beagle came out around the same time but, to me, Howl’s Moving Castle is the definitive idea of what cozy fantasy could be. Even if the wizard Howl in the book is such a jerk – I love him for it!"

"Diana Wynne Jones is a really underrated novelist, perhaps because she is most popular among children and people of all ages who read children’s literature. Young adult books often cut to the heart of human relationships. Literature for young people sometimes simplifies things by making them metaphorical, by moving them into a fairy-tale world. That often means YA stories give us some of the most profound stories of human relationships. Howl’s Moving Castle is a story of this caliber. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It both hews to and subverts the conventions of fairy tales. Our main character, Sophie, is the oldest of three daughters. She systematically underrates herself: in a fairy-tale world, it’s only the youngest daughter who gets to have interesting adventures. Very early in the book, she encounters a wicked witch who transforms her into an old lady. This transformation literalizes her feelings of worthlessness. Mortified, she hides from her family and finds a new home in the castle of the title. Its proprietor, Howl, is charming and brilliant, but also bad-tempered and apt to regard young women he encounters as disposable love objects. The fact that Sophie inhabits an old woman’s body allows him to see her true self. It follows the fairy-tale pattern of magical disguise or false appearance providing a window into people’s essential self, beyond the outer level of appearances. Sophie’s terrible transformation also frees her to become her true self, to speak out and have adventures and do all the things she’s ruled out for herself up to that time. What makes it fit so well in the category of love story is that the relationship between these two imperfect characters leads both characters to become their best (or at least better) selves. A former student, now an editor at Time , recently emailed to ask what I might know about the 17th-century practice of assigning valentines by lot, in other words, names pulled out of a hat. Although I’m not expert on the folk history of Valentine’s Day, I would say that All Hallows’ Eve and Christmas are more widely present in literature than Valentine’s Day. The love story, whether it’s one of the great romantic tragedies or a comedy that ends happily, is one of the three or four most popular patterns for plots (crime and coming-of-age are two other obvious ones). The tristesse inherent in many of these stories is captured best for me by the philosophy of love attributed to Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium . The premise is that gods cleaved in half two-parted humans (some male-male, some female-female, some female-male—listen to Stephen Trask’s “The Origin of Love” for a magical reinterpretation of the concept), leaving us often to spend a whole life in search of that missing other half, with the hope that we can restore ourselves to that elusive feeling of wholeness when we achieve true love."