I Capture The Castle Revisited
May. 1st, 2024 08:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo How magical to live in a ruined castle in the 1930s even if you have no money and have sold all the furniture and are reduced to eating meals of cold rice and sprouts....
Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle is one of my favourite books. I find that what I remember best is the narrator's voice and the castle itself. What I have forgotten is the story, which is all to the good because I have no more idea of how the plot is going to resolve itself than if this was a first reading. All the people are alive and thriving- even the two American lover-boys who I found disappointing first time round. Had there ever been a movie made the young Tilda Swinton would have been a shoo-in for the role of Topaz- the narrator's otherworldly step-mother...
(Ah, I've done my research since writing the last para- and see there was a movie made- by the BBC- in 2003 and Tara Fitzgerald played Topaz. I've no idea if it's any good. At least we were spared the projected Disney version starring Hayley Mills- which would have been horrible...)
Dodie Smith also wrote plays and 101 Dalmations- and a number of other adult novels which, according to the critics, fail to live up to this one....
....which was written in the 1940s in a fit of homesickness for England. Dodie had married a conscientious objector and they had chosen to sit out the Second World War in California. She was working as a scriptwriter on the Hollywood production line- and despising it- but finding some sort of mitigation of the awfulness in the friendship of Christopher Isherwood....
Dodie's love of England, humorous, mystical, pushing at the boundaries of what can be said in words- chimes with my own. Oh, what an excellent text this is to be reading at Beltane....
Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle is one of my favourite books. I find that what I remember best is the narrator's voice and the castle itself. What I have forgotten is the story, which is all to the good because I have no more idea of how the plot is going to resolve itself than if this was a first reading. All the people are alive and thriving- even the two American lover-boys who I found disappointing first time round. Had there ever been a movie made the young Tilda Swinton would have been a shoo-in for the role of Topaz- the narrator's otherworldly step-mother...
(Ah, I've done my research since writing the last para- and see there was a movie made- by the BBC- in 2003 and Tara Fitzgerald played Topaz. I've no idea if it's any good. At least we were spared the projected Disney version starring Hayley Mills- which would have been horrible...)
Dodie Smith also wrote plays and 101 Dalmations- and a number of other adult novels which, according to the critics, fail to live up to this one....
....which was written in the 1940s in a fit of homesickness for England. Dodie had married a conscientious objector and they had chosen to sit out the Second World War in California. She was working as a scriptwriter on the Hollywood production line- and despising it- but finding some sort of mitigation of the awfulness in the friendship of Christopher Isherwood....
Dodie's love of England, humorous, mystical, pushing at the boundaries of what can be said in words- chimes with my own. Oh, what an excellent text this is to be reading at Beltane....
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Date: 2024-05-01 07:52 am (UTC)I liked it very much: Romola Garai as Cassandra Mortmain, Bill Nighy as her father. I was shown it by
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Date: 2024-05-01 05:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-01 06:09 pm (UTC)It didn't happen for me, but you still don't have to see the film.
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Date: 2024-05-01 02:05 pm (UTC)Underneath the gauzy romance, it's a real treatise on rural poverty. 😀
I've seen the film. Romula Garai plays Cassandra, and she was quite good—although, of course, the film didn't do justice to the novel.
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Date: 2024-05-01 05:36 pm (UTC)Though Powell and Pressburger might have had a good stab at it....
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Date: 2024-05-01 06:40 pm (UTC)I'd have loved to see that.