2020 read #1: I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
343 pages
Published 1948
Read from December 26 to January 10
Rating: 4 out of 5

This is the first book that I can recall that was hard to read because I liked the narrator so much.

I requested it from the library after seeing it name-checked in Jo Walton's Among Others (which I partially re-read last year). The continuity between the two narrators' styles is immediately evident, which no doubt added to my instant liking for Smith's Cassandra. At first Castle is a tale of the Mortmain family's poverty and fallen fortunes in the romantic ruins of Godsend Castle, which touched the same Anglophile nerve that made me feel so at home reading about Walnut Tree Farm. (Just as an aside, I believe my Anglophilia took root from reading so much Wells and Conan Doyle in my youth. I may detest the nation's current politics, but a romantic notion of England and its countryside grows rampant in my imagination.) They barely eke out an existence on garden vegetables and the occasional egg spared by their hen. When the family's fortunes begin to rise again in the first half of the novel, all I wanted to do was keep reading of Cassandra's enthusiasm for ham suppers and full bellies. I know what it feels like to have to scrape together something, anything at all to eat—and then to go from that to having small, satisfying luxuries again.

Unfortunately, the book isn't content with describing our young hero's lunches. It quickly builds into a complex structure of people falling in love with someone who is in love with someone else, what Cassandra herself sums up as "a follow-my-leader game of second-best we have all been playing." Cassandra's emotional turmoil and growing anguish made me long for those simple pleasures of ham and tinned salmon—and made me put down the book repeatedly whenever the poor girl poured out her broken heart, or made a decision that made it all worse.

Written in the 1940s and set in the 1930s, Castle has its share of uncomfortably dated notions, especially on gender and relationships. Cassandra's father James is a writer who turned out one famous early modernist novel and then withdrew into a long period of stagnation and reading detective novels alone at his desk; her stepmother Topaz is a former artist's model who longs to be the muse of and longsuffering wife to this "genius," believing he will turn out further works of brilliance under her ministrations, while Cassandra, her older sister Rose, and their younger brother Thomas all look after themselves as best as they can. James' emotional abuse and neglect toward his family is excused by Topaz (and later by Cassandra) as an essential ingredient of his authorial genius. When Cassandra falls head over heels for an older man who takes advantage of the moment to kiss her "impulsively," our girl blames herself for "permitting" him, condemning herself as "wicked"—and then pines after him for the rest of the book.

Despite that, the winsomeness of its narration does wonders to elevate Castle—earnest without sounding forced, charming without apparent effort, honest and analytical and frustrated with the inadequacies of the language. Cassandra is the best part of Castle, and I'm happy to have spent so much time in her head.