Katie's Adventures in Storyland II

Winter is coming, the nights are getting darker and the bookshops are getting busier. This can mean only one thing - a new Cecelia Ahern book! (Actually it means many things. Christmas. Crunchy autumn leaves. Woolly jumpers. Hot chocolate.) Though I am usually averse to chick-lit, Miss Ahern's novels come at just the right time, when I am in need of some reading material that is fluffy and comforting, but without being utterly mushy. And her book covers are so pretty! How can you resist something that looks like this?

One Hundred Names is an original concept: journalist Kitty Logan asks her dying friend and mentor what is the one story you always wanted to write? The only answer is a list of names, and Kitty has to search all across Dublin to find the story that links these hundred people. One Hundred Names is quite a short novel, and I wondered whether Kitty would actually meet all hundred people on the list. Of course she doesn't, but the characters she does meet are lovable and memorable, a selection of people of all walks of life. Ultimately, the great mystery of the novel turned out not to be very surprising at all - I guessed it early on, but this in no way affected my enjoyment of the story. This book is all about the journey and the people, with an uplifting message that everybody, without exception, has a story to tell.

In between the other books I've been reading in the last couple of weeks, I have been spending some time with the Andreas girls in Eleanor Brown's The Weird Sisters. This is a quite gentle tale of three sisters, very different in temperament, who return to the family home when their mother falls sick, each bringing their own struggles and secrets with them. The Weird Sisters was quite a slow read, but by the end I found myself really invested in the Andreas family. Rose, Bean and Cordy are really Rosalind, Bianca and Cordelia, named for Shakespearean heroines by their obsessed father.

The family is an eccentric one, structured around Mr Andreas' love of the Bard which, though not fully shared by his daughters, plays a huge part in their identity. Trivial matters and deep truths are wrapped in a blanket of quotations - a delight for a literature-lover like myself who also sees the world through the lens of story, but I can see how it could prove irritating to a reader of a different disposition.

What stands out for The Weird Sisters among other family stories is the narration. Though scenes featuring one sister is a standard third-person, the sisterly relationship is almost a fourth character and is a fluid, omniscient "we" that could refer to any two of the trio, or all three. The sisters bicker and fight, are filled with envy and resentment for each other, but their identity is as one part of three. A crucial theme of the story is of the three girls finding where they belong in the world individually, not just in relation to the other two.

After reading a novel with its plethora of Shakespearean quotes and references, I had to return to the Bard himself, and so to the library I went to look at its selection of plays. I have read, studied and watched several of the Comedies and Tragedies, but I had never read any of Shakespeare's History plays, so I chose to read Julius Caesar. Much to the disappointment of my father, I have next to no knowledge of Roman history, so I went into Caesar with only the knowledge that the title character is murdered. In actual fact, Julius Caesar only appears in about three scenes of his play, and his death occurs halfway through. The story revolves around the conspiracy and assassination of Caesar - the build-up to the event, and its aftermath. If there is a protagonist, it must be Brutus, moralist and betrayer, but there are no heroes, only villains and anti-heroes. Reading this play, I found it difficult to take sides, but only impartially watch a historical event replayed in iambic pentameter. Still, Shakespeare humanises the great names of history, showing multi-faceted characters. Take Caesar: arrogant before the men, gentler and perhaps more vulnerable at home with his wife, shown for his strengths as well as his weaknesses in soliloquy, and all this in three short scenes.

Of course, Shakespeare wrote for the stage, not for the page, but I get as much pleasure from reading his plays as I do watching them, being able to enjoy the poetry and philosophy of his words at my own leisure, rereading favourite lines or passages I did not understand the first time. But although Shakespeare has a reputation for being long-winded and impenetrable, I do not find him so. Caesar is a relatively short play, without any padding, but each scene building plot, tension and character, as tightly-crafted as the best thrillers.

I read the Arden Shakespeare edition (pictured) but was not happy with the method of footnoting. This is evidently a study edition, with lots of useful notes taking up half the page - but I prefer to read the play straight through, with notes at the end of the book instead, where I can look them up if I want, or not if I don't want. They were not only a distraction, but also presumed upon the play not being read as a thriller, being free with the spoilers for the benefit of students on a reread (if it is not incongruous to talk of "spoilers" for a 400-year-old play whose events were centuries old even at the time of writing.)

Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill

Coming out the other side of a reading slump, I found myself in the fantasy and horror section of the library looking for something a bit different. I'm working my way through The Lord of the Rings, one chapter per night, so I didn't want a Tolkien-inspired high fantasy epic, nor did I want anything with vampires in. But Heart-Shaped Box stood out from the rest. When it was published a few years ago, I'd read the back blurb more than once, but never got as far as buying it. Ditto Joe Hill's other novel, Horns. But there was something that appealed about these books - and Neil Gaiman's recommendation on the front sealed the deal.

Retired death metal star Judas Coyne has built up quite a collection of sinister and macabre artifacts over the years, so when he sees someone selling a ghost on the internet, he can't refuse. But when the black, heart-shaped box arrives on his doorstep, Jude discovers this is not just any old ghost, but one which will make him confront the darkness in his past.

Heart-Shaped Box had me utterly gripped from the beginning. To buy a ghost on the internet was a brand-new idea in a world of recycled stories. I wasn't really sure what to expect from this book: was this a quirky dark fantasy or an out-and-out horror? It turned out to be a more straight-forward horror than I was expecting - though perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised, since Hill is the son of Stephen King, and from whom better could he have learned his craft? He doesn't take long to launch into a story of suspense, with fear being conjured by descriptions of the wrong sort of nothing, and then when that is replaced by the wrong sort of something, it is narrated so matter-of-factly that it took a moment for what I was reading to sink, which, when it did, happened with a really creeping horror.

The ghost of the story is a far more solid presence than in other ghost stories, possibly because he is quickly named and described as "Craddock" or "The dead man." This haunting is no vaguely hostile threat that may or may not be influencing Jude's world. Craddock is a person, not just a presence, and a particularly malevolent one. Once he appears, the story becomes more standard horror fare - there's something in Jude's house that is out to get him, and might also be in his head. But that's not all there is. There is plenty of variety in Heart-Shaped Box: it is a something-in-the-house horror story, a road trip, a psychological thriller and more. Three or four times, when I thought I had an idea of what sort of story this was going to be, Hill threw in a twist that changed everything.

Jude Coyne is a seriously messed-up individual, and I can't say I liked him. Having an unsympathetic protagonist will usually turn me off a novel - but though I didn't like Jude, he wasn't unsympathetic. He was a man with many layers, a tough history and believable reasons for being who he was. I was convinced at first that his fate was inescapable - and I didn't want that. I wanted him to survive and come through the story unscathed, if not unchanged. (You'll have to read the book to find out if he does or not.) Once or twice, I nearly lost all sympathy with Jude - he does/is/has done some pretty awful things - but Joe Hill kept me caring despite Jude's best efforts. And I loved Marybeth, (also known as Georgia,) Jude's stubbornly loyal girlfriend of half his age.

The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange - Mark Barrowcliffe

Coventry, 1976. For a brief, blazing summer, twelve-year-old Mark Barrowcliffe had the chance to be normal. 

He blew it. 

- From the cover blurb of The Elfish Gene.

In his sometimes comic, sometimes painful and often lovably geeky memoir, Mark Barrowcliffe writes of a youth misspent around the Dungeons and Dragons table. Misspent, you wonder? OK, it's a hobby, and not one generally considered cool, but it's just a bit of fun. People do it. So what if it's not "cool?" Still, Barrowcliffe chronicles the way that this game took over his life, stirred up his imagination and led to him living more in the world of make-believe than reality.

I felt rather sorry for the teenaged Mark, awkward and obsessive, someone who, like all teenagers, was keen to find his niche in the world, who, if he must be a misfit, would be a misfit with all his might and main, but who wasted so much time and energy trying to impress people who clearly despised him. It made me feel rather sad to read of how much he idolised Porter, the dungeonmaster of his D&D group, who never pretended to have any time or respect for Mark. Come on, kid, I wanted to yell through the pages and across the years, you can do better than that! Worst of all was when he would side with Porter in a sad attempt to win a smidgen of approval - or, at least, not have Porter kill off Mark's D&D character! - against his true friend, Billy.

The Elfish Gene was full of outrageous stories of boyish experiments gone horribly wrong and Mark's attempt to try to weasel his way out of ridiculous situations. I could sympathise with his all-encompassing obsessions. Friends and family would confirm that I usually have something that's always in my mind, and at one time it was The Lord of the Rings - which, of course, had a huge influence on the world of Dungeons and Dragons (and subsequently on Mark Barrowcliffe, with several chapter titles being lifted from the novel.)  Barrowcliffe claims to have read Lord of the Rings seventeen times, and yet he claims that there are no females in the whole novel except ethereal elf-maidens and cuddly hobbit-wives.

Excuse me?!


Ethereal elf-maidens, cuddly hobbit-wives and Eowyn, the asskicking shieldmaiden of Rohan, if you please!

(Calm down, Edwards!)

Similarly, although I have never D&Ded (though I came close a couple of times,) I took exception to Barrowcliffe's claim that girls just didn't - although I can appreciate the lack of appeal to females in the groups he described in his memoir. Because, quite frankly, Barrowcliffe presents his teenage self as rather a brat: irritating, obnoxious, pretentious and too much intent on idolising other obnoxious brats, although amusing to read about, from a safe distance. It was actually quite embarrassing to read in times, and although Mark's love for the game was clear, I felt that there was a sneering undertone in the narration. I felt that this was a bit dorky to be associated with and am a little embarrassed even writing a review of a book about Dungeons and Dragons - and I am geeky and proud! I think the adult Barrowcliffe's ridicule rubbed off on me from the pages, and it's upsetting that someone should feel this way about something that they used to devote so much love to.

Barrowcliffe is honest and unflinching in sharing a slightly embarrassing past which nonetheless made him who he is today - and yet, I suspect he doth protest too much when he tries to persuade the reader that he's left this life behind him.

Weird Things Customers Say In Bookshops, Jen Campbell

I've been working in a bookshop for four years now, and in that time I've had some pretty peculiar interactions with the general public. Like the lady who wanted to know exactly why a certain book "may be unsuitable for younger readers," and was furious that I couldn't give her details. Sorry, Madam, I wanted to say. I'm on a mission to read ALL THE BOOKS, but haven't got to that one yet. Or the people who wander in looking for jam-pot covers between the romance and the science fiction shelves. There are some days you find yourself wondering if, actually it's you going mad rather than everyone else around you. So it was reassuring when I found blogs chronicling other booksellers' similar experiences. I stumbled upon Jen Campbell's blog  maybe a year ago, and chuckled and sighed over the strange, infuriating and hilarious stories she had to tell. Recently this has been published in book form and I chuckled and sighed once more. Weird Things is a slim, brilliantly illustrated volume, but packed full of the quirks of book-buyers... and those who just want a cuppa while they wait for a bus.

If my daughter wants to buy books from the teenage section do you need to see some form of ID? It was her thirteenth birthday this weekend. I can show you pictures of the cake. You can count the candles.

Do you have a copy of Atonement? But not the film cover please. Keira Knightley's neck makes me want to punch things. 

 and then there's the classic which probably every bookseller has heard some variation of:

I read a book in the sixties. I don't remember the author, or the title. But it was green, and it made me laugh. Do you know which one I mean?

The slightly disturbing thing about Weird Things is that, except for a few pages at the back, the whole book is made up of Jen's own experiences in just two shops! I'll be leaving this in the staffroom at work for my colleagues to read - or possibly buying a second copy for the staff library - to reassure them that we are not alone. Recommended for booksellers, book-lovers and anyone who has had to work with the general public.

February mini-reviews.

Hi everyone. Despite my lack of blog posts recently, I've actually been reading a lot, I just haven't had an awful lot to say about any of the books. However, I felt it was about time to share some thoughts on a few of the things that I've been reading.

Sandman - Neil Gaiman

Since discovering that one of the Island libraries has nearly all of the Sandman graphic novels, I have been making regular trips and marching through the series, before passing them on to my friend. There is a wide variety in the style and format of stories, like an elaborate patchwork quilt: one volume will be a long narrative, and the next made up of short stories. Some star the titular Sandman, Dream, and his Endless siblings: Destiny, Death, Delirium, Desire, Despair and Destruction, whereas in other volumes they only appear occasionally, around the edges of the stories, so to speak.

I'm currently up to vol. 8: Worlds' End, in which travellers from all through time, space and contradictory but co-existing realities find themselves stranded by a storm in an Inn, in which they occupy their time by telling stories of all flavours and styles. But the storm is not an ordinary storm, but a "reality storm" caused by something strange and rare and unexplained. When the tales have all been told, the travellers go to the window and see a strange thing in the sky, a thing that none could explain or understand, but somehow we all, reader and character alike, could sense that things were never going to be the same again. Behind the pages of the stories told in Worlds' End, another story has been taking place, a story of enormous significance, hidden from the eyes of the ordinary - extraordinary - folk who dwell in the Sandman universe(s) and yet to be revealed to the readers, no doubt in volume 9.

I felt almost afraid to turn the page,
fascinated but scared of what I might see in the sky.

By this point, Sandman has become more than "just a comic book" to be a masterpiece of storytelling, in any format.

Submarine -  Joe Dunthorne

Submarine is a coming-of-age tale of Oliver Tate, a precocious teenage boy, an account of his relationships with family, friends and girls, and his observations of the world around him. It is an intelligent, somewhat poetic read, and one which led me back to my Superior Person's Book of Words to indulge the word-nerd tendencies that I share with the narrator. However, I didn't altogether like Oliver - he was a rather obnoxious kid - and the scenes in which he participated in the bullying of a classmate were an insurmountable barrier between me and the book, and Dunthorne seemed to rely too much on cringe-comedy and explicit content for my tastes - possibly appropriate for a tale about a teenage boy. I'm not saying that I entirely disliked Submarine, but I don't feel that I have gained anything from having read it, and shan't be rereading or watching the film.

The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins (reread)

When I first read the series a couple of years ago, I wrote, "I'm not sure that The Hunger Games is as amazing as the hype had led me to believe, but it is a very good book, and it was a lot better than the book blurb and my reading taste came together to expect." Catching Fire won me over, and evidently the story lingered in my brain, because over the last months I've had dream after dream about being in that arena, about being Katniss Everdeen. With the hype mounting for the new film which comes into cinemas next month, I am still undecided whether or not I actually want to see it. 

The trailer is amazing. Watching it, I felt tears stab at my eyes a couple of times, when Katniss shouts in desperation and love for her sister: "I volunteer!" and the salute to her from the citizens of District 12. And yet - there is a movie already in my mind that I feel a fierce attachment and loyalty to. Flicking through The Tribute Guide which came into bookstores recently, I nearly shouted aloud, "You are NOT President Snow!" (Donald Sutherland is an excellent actor and I am sure he will play the part admirably, but he is not my President Snow.) Some pictures looked perfect, while others I judged as "too sci-fi." Jennifer Lawrence is almost Katniss, Josh Hutcherson a passable Peeta, Gale I never had a very strong image of, so he'll do. Rue. Cinna. Effie Trinket. Prim. All fine. Great, even. It looks a like a great movie. 

But I'm still not certain. The concept of the book - children killing each other for entertainment purposes - repelled me, and watching it as a film takes you closer to the real experience, the discomfort of knowing you'll be watching the Hunger Games recreated, rather than reading about them. (Maybe that's just me.) And the other thing: I have a phobia of wasps - can't even say or type the word without flinching, and there is a horrific scene with mutant wasps, or "tracker-jackers." Is this spheksophobia strong enough to deter me from watching the film?

Reading The Hunger Games the second time around, I realise that Katniss' affections could go either way, being manipulated and fabricated before she's really aware that she has any romantic feelings, being formed by her circumstances. Interestingly, on my first time reading the books, if I had any strong opinions on the matter, I suppose I was slightly in favour of Team Peeta, whereas this time I'm veering more towards Team Gale. I wonder what has changed.

Wish Me Luck - Margaret Dickinson

I picked up this cosy wartime romance in a charity shop years ago, and forgot that I'd even got it until yesterday, when I wanted a break from the doom and gloom of Panem. I have little time for romance, whether that be Mills and Boon, or chick lit, but occasionally I'll make an exception for a sweet story from the "granny" section of the bookstore, wartime romances, family sagas, usually seeming to take place in World War 2 Liverpool. Wish Me Luck is the story of Fleur, a WAAF (women's branch of the Royal Air Force) girl who falls in love with an RAF officer. Their relationship is marred, not only by the dangers of being in love during wartime, but by their parents, whose own pasts are intertwined by secrets long gone but never forgotten.

Wish Me Luck is a light, easy read. Dickinson's style is simple but warm. She hooked me with the mysteries and kept the plot twisting so that it wasn't predictable. She recreates 1940s Lincolnshire and Nottingham well, peopled with a likeable, well-rounded cast. With one exception. Fleur's mother was too unpleasant, a bitter, shrieking harridan who is never given much development or redemption, and towards the end, I felt that the story tailed off a little. Of course it is inevitable that any book set on the home front of World War 2 is going to feature some sort of tragedy, but it all seemed to come at once, like an avalanche of heartbreak, all at once. Still, Wish Me Luck is a very sweet, "nice" sort of story over all, and despite the deluge of disaster before the happy ending, just the sort of book to cheer me up when I was feeling low.

The Gum Thief, Douglas Coupland

I wanted to fall in love again, I realised. Not with a man. I’m far too lazy and selfish right now to arrange my life around another person’s. I’m too fond of going where I want, doing what I want, when I want, acting on the spur of the moment without having to be accountable to someone else. No, what I wanted was to fall in love with a story. To discover something brand-new that grabs me by the brain and imagination and takes me entirely by surprise. Something that would mean my life would not be quite the same after having read it.

Seeing Douglas Coupland’s The Gum Thief in the library, I wondered if, perhaps, this might be The One. I had vague memories of my friend Anna recommending Mr Coupland - possibly JPod - and Girlfriend In A Coma has been on my to-read-maybe-one-day list for so long I can’t even remember why any more. My friend Anna is very clever and a bit nerdy but in such a way to make it cool, and she likes Neil Gaiman and has purple hair. If she recommended Coupland, maybe I would like him too. Anyway, I’d give him a try. The blurb on the back hooked me: “Bethany discovers Roger’s notebook and finds that he’s writing diary entries pretending to be her - and weirdly, he’s getting it right.”

Of course, when you go looking to spontaneously fall in love and be taken by surprise, you’re doomed to failure. The Gum Thief is entertaining and voices many truths about Life, The Universe and Everything™ - especially if you’re stuck in a dead-end job in retail - but ultimately, I did not connect emotionally with the book. When reading, the pages passed quickly, with multiple narrators and short chapters to keep interest, but I didn’t feel a great urge to return to it when I’d put it down. The book’s tone was subdued. Roger is in his forties divorced and disillusioned, while Bethany is a twenty four year old goth living at home with her mother, with vague plans of visiting Europe with her new boyfriend, but no real plans for the future. I could identify with Roger’s and Bethany’s observations in their working life in a Staples superstore, and I liked the characters well enough, but somehow I felt distanced from their world.

As well as Roger’s and Bethany’s diaries and letters to each other - interspersed with the occasional letter from Bethany’s mother and other Staples employees, many chapters of The Gum Thief are chapters from Roger’s attempt at a novel: Glove Pond. Unfortunately, this novel is bad. Deliberately bad writing - at least deliberate on Coupland’s part - full of dry dialogue, telling-not-showing, faux-intellectual ponderings on life and creative but not quite successful imagery. And when so much of a book is full of bad writing and pretentiousness, even as a literary device, the lingering impression I take away from reading the book is - bad writing and pretentiousness. Glove Pond colours The Gum Thief - or perhaps I should say it sucks out all the colour, leaving a white and grey, cold and somewhat empty-feeling novel.

Or, conversely, maybe the fictional-within-fiction Glove Pond helps to draw attention to what colour does exist in Roger’s and Bethany’s apparently bleak, dull lives. It makes the chapters written by them interesting by comparison. Time will tell which of these contradictory impressions of The Gum Thief is stronger in my mind.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

My best friend, Judith, is only two months older than me, but when we were at school, she was in the year above me. This proved very useful when it came to discovering literature. Many a book I read and loved came second-hand through her talking about what she was studying in English. This was certainly the case for my first Sherlock Holmes stories. I must have been either ten or eleven, and after her raving about Holmes, I just had to find out what all the fuss was about. Even at eleven, I didn't like missing out on a good story. I vividly remember that I read four stories, one of which was "The Speckled Band," which captivated me, appealing to my slightly ghoulish imagination. This must have been one of my first really grown-up stories, and it was like nothing I'd ever read before.

I've read The Hound of the Baskervilles a few times, but aside from that, Sherlock Holmes lay at the back of my mind for many years. I watched a few stories on TV, acquired much of the knowledge through the osmosis of popular culture, but didn't read much until about eighteen months ago, when BBC started airing Sherlock for the first time. The series sent me right back to the original stories: A Study in Scarlet, and The Sign of Four. After an unusually long wait for a second series of a TV show, Sherlock returned to the screens once more on New Year's Day this year, and I returned to the next volume of the series: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.


After two novels, the third installment is a collection of short stories. This makes the book easy to dip in and out of, and you need little knowledge of what has come before, but can read the stories in any order - there may be a throwaway reference to "the case of..." but nothing that has any bearing on the tale. In fact, the stories aren't even compiled in chronological order - some are set after Watson's marriage, others before. They are narrated by Dr Watson, as written up long after the event. Though far from simple stories, they are told simply, often to the same formula: The problem is presented, Dr Watson, the client and the reader are all baffled, but not Sherlock Holmes, oh no! He ponders a lot, asks strange questions, goes out, solves the mystery then comes back and then tells us how he did it. My favourite stories in the collection are those which have a little less talking and a little more action, those stories in which Watson gets to go "on location" with Holmes.

Some of the tales are rather silly, such as "The Blue Carbuncle" - a valuable jewel which nearly ends up in the Christmas dinner. Two stories require suspension of disbelief as dodgy characters fool those closest to them with disguised identities, and then there is "The Red-Headed League." A fun, entertaining and cunning tale, but how gullible was Holmes's client, duped into joining this fictitious club, just for gingers?

Adventures also contains some of the most wonderful and memorable cases. We meet The Woman, Irene Adler, the one woman Sherlock acknowledges. There is the gruesome tale of the "Engineer's Thumb," and the "Copper Beeches" mystery, first dismissed by Holmes as his "zero point" for interest, but which turns out to be one of the most intriguing and exciting of all. And of course, "The Speckled Band," my old friend, the original locked-door mystery.

Yes, reading these stories, sometimes I found myself rolling my eyes at some of these cliched tropes - but let's not forget that they were not cliched. These are the original twisty page-turning detective stories, those that helped to invent the genre. I won't say Conan Doyle was the inventor - check out Poe's Auguste Dupin stories that came before - but for twists and thrills and cleverness, I think nothing has topped the Sherlock Holmes series in over a century. Maybe Agatha Christie put up a fair fight.

The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson

What is a psychopath? That is the question at the heart of Jon Ronson’s book which is advertised as: “A journey through the madness industry.” What is a psychopath, how are psychopaths diagnosed, is there a cure, and what is the difference between psychopaths who are institutionalised, and the psychopaths at the top of the institutions: politics, business, entertainment and so on? These are just some of the questions Ronson explores in his study in madness.

In his research for this book, Ronson meets a man who feigned madness to try to escape a prison sentence – only to discover it is impossible to prove his sanity. In a chapter that reads more like the “madness literature” of Catch-22 or One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, every action “Tony” takes to show that, in fact, he is not insane, is taken as evidence that, in fact, he is. Or that he is not mad, but still a psychopath.

Ronson catalogues historic diagnoses and attempts at treating psychopathy – and his findings are surreal, sometimes disastrous, often seeming more like a skewed fiction than reality – interviews the psychologist responsible for coming up with the definitive psychopathy test, and starts applying the test to various people he meets: the mass-murderer, the top businessman with ruthless ambition and a love for firing people, the M15 agent-turned-conspiracy theorist. And yes, it certainly seems that the same traits that label some people as “psychopaths” are those that are encouraged in the people judged as “most successful.” Is society really run my psychopaths?

At the same time, Ronson argues, it is easy for people to be misdiagnosed, and especially in this day and age, any strangeness or eccentricity is easily – too easily – categorised as “mental disorders,” sometimes with disastrous results. Where do we draw the line? is the question we are left asking, in the fragile balancing act between “madness” and “sanity.”

I’m not a natural reader of non-fiction, but I found Ronson’s style to be easy-going, understandable considering I have no background in psychology, a curious and fascinating, if somewhat frightening insight into the world of diagnosing psychopathy.

Howl's Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones

When Sophie Hatter falls foul of the wicked Witch of the Waste, she heads off to the best place to get help - to the mysterious moving castle inhabited by the mysterious wizard Howl. But Howl, it is said, eats the hearts or souls of every young girl he comes across. Undeterred by the rumours, Sophie establishes herself as cleaner in the Moving Castle, and is whisked away in an adventure of magic spells and curses, fire demons, charmed suits and seven-league boots, and she even gets to peep into a strange land called Wales, before the Witch's spell can be lifted and Sophie can, despite being the ill-fated eldest child, find her happily-ever-after.

Diana Wynne Jones was my best friend's favourite author growing up, yet somehow I managed to reach my twenties without having read any of her work. My friend was determined to rectify this, and so this Christmas, alongside my presents, she handed me a huge bag of all the books I'd lent her over the past year, and a few of her own in return, including Howl's Moving Castle.


Sophie Hatter is a practical, no-nonsense young lady who is well aware of the conventions of the sort of story she lives in. She knows the importance of birth order in stories, that the eldest child is never successful in seeking their fortune, and accepts her lot in life. But when she finds herself transformed into an elderly woman, she decides it is up to her to find her way out of the mess, which she does with a level head and a lot of stubbornness. The Wizard Howl's reputation is greatly exaggerated, as such reputations usually are, but he is still a vain and selfish man who Sophie can't tell if he can be trusted or not. Still, he is an amusing and likeable character, for all his foibles. 


Some fantasy books are fantasy, and others are fairy tale. Wynne Jones establishes from the very beginning that Howl is set in the land of Once Upon A Time. The world of Ingary is a world where there is no such thing as impossible - although, of course, the impossible has its own rules - and Wynne Jones' simple, matter-of-fact narration of weird and wonderful occurrences, gives the book a dreamlike quality reminiscent of such classics as Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz. But this is a wonderland with a twist. About halfway through the novel, Howl takes Sophie to see his strange, far-away homeland - which is revealed to be 20th Century Wales, and his strange name a corruption of Howell. Howell Jenkins. We get to see our world as if it were the fairyland.




Howl's Moving Castle is a charming and cheeky fairy tale that turns a lot of the traditional fantasy conventions on their heads. I'm off to see a stage play of the story in London at the weekend, and it has also been adapted by Studio Ghibli into an anime film.