I Capture The Castle

"I just envy you reading Dodie Smith for the first time. This is a book that is, as you say, special to so many people. It takes us right back to the initial dilemma of choosing five books on grief: you could pick any book for consolation. But I Capture the Castle was one of the books that was extremely important to me when I found it on a shelf by accident, aged 14 or 15. 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 is a delicious, glorious, coming-of-age tale told with humor about two sisters who live in a derelict, tumble-down, ramshackle castle. They arrive there with their mother and father. Their mother has since died, the father has remarried, and, rather like Jane Austen, two brothers come and live nearby the family. The sisters—Cassandra and Rose—decide that perhaps they’ll set their sights on the men at the nearby manor, thinking maybe one of them can snag a rich husband. As the story unfolds, Rose and Simon get together, but Cassandra is really in love with Simon. A boy called Stephen who’s in love with Cassandra is lurking around in the house as well. So it’s chock full of unrequited love. If you’re a teenager desperately hoping that someone you’re desperately in love with will pay attention to you, you’ll relate to how this book asks, ‘Why does he not know that I exist?’ “We don’t just grieve the loss of a person—we can also grieve a lost love” But when choosing these books, I thought that we don’t just grieve the loss of a person—we can also grieve a lost love. The devastation precipitated by the end of a relationship can be a real bereavement. I chose this book for its brilliant rendering of longing for a love that probably won’t happen. Smith tells the story through Cassandra writing in her diary. At the end of the book, she’s thinking about whether Simon will come back. She wonders, “But why, oh why, must Simon still love Rose? When she has so little in common with him and I have so much?” It ends beautifully: There was mist on Midsummer Eve, mist when we drove into the dawn. He said he would come back. Only the margin left to write on now. I love you, I love you, I love you. Exactly. There are two bereaved children at the heart of this novel. Cassandra has lost her mother; Stephen, who is the son of a former servant—and a kind of foster-brother by default—is an orphan. Cassandra is, in some ways, just a child. She talks about not even really remembering the face of her mother. I don’t know whether I’d call it a ‘children’s novel.’ I’d place it alongside Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm (1932) or Wodehouse—you could read it at any age. But it has true pain right at its core: risk, pain and suffering. Underneath the surface, it’s a novel of absolute desolation. Cassandra is in mourning without having fully realized it yet. Her desperation to be noticed is partly because she likes Simon, and partly, I think, because she’s desperate for someone to love her. Her father, too, seems to be torn up by grief. He’s trying to write this magnum opus, and has to be locked up until he comes out with his own Finnegans Wake . I didn’t pick up on this in my first reading, but actually, it’s a brilliant novel about a family in utter crisis. Not only financially, which often happens after a bereavement, but emotionally. “Writing in the margins is sometimes the only way we can say how we feel” You don’t quite know what role each individual is meant to be playing, no one is really talking about how they’re feeling, everyone wants to take risks they shouldn’t. This novel is often fondly remembered, but I want to highlight just how psychologically intriguing it is. At the end, it comes full circle: writing in the margins is sometimes the only way we can say how we feel."

"Like Little Women this is another long-standing book for me. I would say this is the most important book in my life. My niece has just turned thirteen, and I bought her a really nice copy of it for her birthday, because that was the sort of age I was when I first read it and I wanted to pass that experience on to her. “I would say this is the most important book in my life” I remember feeling, immediately when reading the book that this was something so different, this was something so special, there was something about it that really spoke to me, and I just loved it. I still love it. Every time I pick it up to read it, I think it’s an absolutely magical book. The relationship between the sisters, Cassandra and Rose, is such an interesting one. There’s a sense that these two sisters are so different, and at the same time they’ve been isolated by their peculiar and magical upbringing. Even though they are different and they want different things – at the heart of their relationship it is clear that they are the only two people that could understand where they’ve come from, because to anyone else it would just seem too strange. These two characters have this shared history and understand each other from, as you say, from the beginning in a way that other characters who come into the story never could. It adds such rich layers to the storytelling and the dynamics between these two sisters. And so, in I Capture the Castle, Cassandra understands why Rose makes certain decisions, because she understands where they’ve come from – even if she doesn’t agree with them. And, she understands them in a way that I think other people are slightly baffled by. In I Capture the Castle these sisters had been living in this insular, claustrophobic bubble for so long – what happens in the moment when that changes? What happens when that world suddenly opens up? What happens when the sisters are separated? What happens when their lives are going in different directions? We see Cassandra trying to understand herself without Rose, and her struggle is so relatable, so well-explored that it gives the book a vibrancy and an immediacy that I love."