Occasionally Random

Title: I Capture the Castle

Author: Dodie Smith

Genre/s: literary fiction

Content/Trigger Warning/s: parental neglect; living in poverty; implied abuse

Synopsis (from publisher's website): 'I write this sitting in the kitchen sink...' This is the story of Cassandra, precocious and charming, who begins a journal detailing her life with her bohemian family in a crumbling old castle. On the cusp of adulthood, Cassandra meets the family's growing challenges of poverty and decay with indefatigable humour and insight.

However, her life is turned upside down when the American heirs to the castle arrive and Cassandra finds herself falling in love. Both a gorgeous study of 1930s England and a sharp exposition of what it's like to be teenage girl, I Capture The Castle is a novel layered with eccentricity and nostalgia.

Buy Here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/i-capture-the-castle-dodie-smith/cc6b7f3b2316f178

Spoiler-Free Review: So this was a really interesting novel, even if it does take a bit of a while to really get going. I find it fascinating how this is considered to be young adult. The language of this novel, as well as the overall construction of the plot and the nuances of it, feels a lot more mature than some novels I’ve read that are supposedly intended for adult audiences. This probably says something very unflattering about how some adult readers today won’t be able to grasp a book that was intended for young adults back in the 1940s - or it can also mean that authors back in the 1940s just had more respect for the reading comprehension of young adults and did not try to treat them too differently from adult readers. That’s still rather unflattering commentary on contemporary readership and authorship, but that’s neither here nor there.

I think the best aspect of this novel is Cassandra’s narrative voice. The entire story is told through her journal entries, and it was quite lovely reading how she built out the setting and the other characters around her in her own voice. But the part I enjoyed the most was how the reader can actually see how Cassandra, as a character, develops over the course of her journal entries. She starts out as somewhat childish at the beginning of the novel, but over the course of her journal entries the reader can actually see how she comes of age - not only in how her thoughts and ideas become more complex as she works them out on the page, but also in how her writing becomes subtly more complex and layered as well. There are, of course, moments when she slips back into being somewhat more childish, but that doesn’t affect her overall shift to adulthood by the end of the novel.

I also found Cassandra’s coming-of-age to be beautifully bittersweet. A lot of that has to do with the writing itself, of course, but it also has to do with what happens to her to actually get her there. While some readers might think the romantic plotline a bit overdone, I thought that it was actually handled quite well, especially since the ending turns out to be more complicated than a straightforward happy ending. And besides, the point of this story isn’t really the romance, but seeing Cassandra grow up.

That being said, given that the story is entirely told from Cassandra’s point-of-view and solely reflects her thoughts and feelings on what is happening around her, the other characters feel a bit less developed than Cassandra herself. This is, of course, a result of the specific type of narrative that this novel takes, but there were moments when I felt that certain characters could have been served a bit better than being reduced to caricatures.

I also noticed how the narrative almost seems to go out of its way to elide, or at least soften, an uncomfortable truth: that Mr. Mortmain neglected his family so much that he allowed them all to slip into poverty - GENTEEL poverty supposedly, but poverty’s still poverty. I suppose Cassandra not dwelling on either of those facts is only to be expected, partly because because Mr. Mortmain’s her father, and partly because no one wants to think of themselves as genuinely POOR, but there were plenty of moments when I wanted to smack Mr. Mortmain upside the head for not actually DOING something to support his family. Instead he leaves it up to Stephen to support them - something the boy didn’t HAVE to do, since they’re not his family, but which he did anyway because of his feelings for Cassandra, and which the Mortmain family appeared okay to exploit for their own survival. There’s no real villain in this story, but if I had to point to one, I’d definitely say it was Mr. Mortmain.

Overall, this was a pretty good read. I liked Cassandra as a character, and the way the novel constructed and developed her and the plot via her journal entries was very well done. But for all the things Cassandra was telling the reader in her entries, I also thought the things she was NOT saying were interesting: her father’s neglect, for instance, and the hard realities of poverty, genteel or otherwise. I understand why the story didn’t linger overlong on those aspects, given the narrative structure, but it’s something the reader would do well to keep an eye out for.