Though Dodie Smith was fifty-two-years-old when she
completed I Capture the Castle (1949), in
Cassandra Mortmain she created one of the most convincing teenage voices in
literature, a protagonist who is as true and compelling as Huck Finn or Holden
Caulfield. Cassandra’s opening sentences
immediately bring us into the rustic, cluttered world of the impoverished
castle where she lives with her unproductive family. ‘I
write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board,
which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea cosy.’ An aspiring writer with a romantic attachment
to her castle home and to the surrounding countryside, Cassandra’s journals
chart the eventful six months that follow the arrival of two half-Americans,
Simon and Neil Cotton, the heirs to the castle, and their mother.
Cassandra’s
heightened feelings of joy, excitement and despair never cloy because they feel
like the authentic emotions of a seventeen-year-old for whom the world of adult
relationships and journeys away from home are shockingly new and exotic. ‘I leaned back and closed my eyes – and
instantly the whole day danced before me. I wasn’t merely remembering, it
seemed to be trapped inside my eyelids; the City, the traffic, the shops were
all there, shimmering, merging. Then my brain began to pick out the bits I
wanted to think about and I realised how the day made a pattern of clothes –
first our white dresses in the early morning, then the consciousness of what
people were wearing in London, then Aunt Millicent’s poor dead clothes, then
all the exquisite things in the shop, then our furs.’
And
apart from the fluency of the prose and the wit of the narrator (like Waugh without
the jaundiced eye) it is perhaps the pure freshness of these impressions that
are key to the novel’s continued popularity. Like Cassandra’s memories of that
day in London, this is a novel that dances before the reader’s eyes.
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