“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
HarperCollins Children’s Books (2000)
304 pages

I hadn’t meant to reread Howl’s Moving Castle, actually. But my mother came down just before the Eid break, and before she went back home, she asked if we had any books she could borrow. I glanced at my bookshelf (which is different from the house’s bookshelf downstairs) and said, “Well, my books are mostly young adult fiction. Are you okay with those?”

“Anything,” said my mother, “as long as it’s enjoyable.”

I saw the host of Diana Wynne Jones books on my shelf and wondered if my mother still wasn’t sick of kids and magic, and asked her, “Did you like the last Harry Potter book?”

“It was okay. Though Rowling shouldn’t have written the epilogue.”

I grinned, thinking it was well that she was nowhere near any of the fandom’s forums. “Would you mind more magic? I have a few books.” I pulled out a few of the books off the shelf: Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant, and Howl’s Moving Castle. My mother would like Howl and Sophie, I thought. “I love this one,” I told her, and she squinted at the cover and went, “Howell’s Moving Castle?”

Heh. “Howl,” I said. “He’s a very handsome wizard. His castle moves. He has a fire demon. He throws tantrums.”

That got my mother’s attention. “Okay, I’ll borrow that one.” And she took it home with her, along with the two Chrestomanci books.

Between the time I offered those books and my mother took them home, they lay on my table, and I realised that I would miss Howl terribly. (I can get absurdly attached to my books sometimes.) So I picked the book up and started to read.

Howl’s Moving Castle was the first Diana Wynne Jones book I ever read and I fell head over heels in love with it. It’s like a fairy tale being turned upside down, with all the unexpected twists to the clichés and going against the fantasy norm. Even the hero and heroine are not typical: there’s a (supposedly) evil wizard, Howl, who lives in the moving castle, who throws tantrums because his hair dye gets all mixed up, and who eats the hearts of young girls for breakfast; and there’s Sophie, the eldest of three sisters who will never have a fortune to seek, being the eldest and all. See: Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid. Fortune always favours the youngest one, right? Sophie is resigned to her fate as a hatter, and spending her days making hats and talking to them. She’s mousy and a bit timid at the start, very much terrified by the moving castle hovering at the edges of her village.

Not very spoilery spoilers below!

One day, a woman comes into her shop, and Sophie, feeling out of sorts, insults her. What Sophie doesn’t realise is the woman is the Witch of Waste, who has come to check the “competition”. She turns Sophie into an old woman and poor Sophie leaves her home, and goes to the moving castle to break the curse. Sophie as a ninety-year-old woman is a delight — she’s peevish, she bullies others to get her own way, and she speaks her mind. She arrives at the castle to find a fire demon called Calcifer in the hearth, who promises to break the curse if she breaks his contract with Howl. She meets Howl’s apprentice, a pleasant boy named Michael, and is quite puzzled not to find anything evil in the castle. She meets Howl the next day, and it turns out Howl was a young man she had met once in her village, and she’s considerably surprised that he eats young girls’ hearts.

Sophie appoints herself as Howl’s cleaning lady (the castle is filthy) and viciously cleans the place while she tries to find clues to Calcifer’s contract. Howl turns out to be not-so-evil — he had Michael blacken his name so that he wouldn’t have to serve the king as the Royal Wizard. (Even Sophie gets sent to the king later on — pretending to be Howl’s mother — to blacken Howl’s name.) Howl slithers out of everything; he doesn’t even commit to things like whether or not Sophie could stay at the castle.

The plot moves at a whirlwind’s pace. There are invisible cloaks, seven-league boots, mistaken identities, scarecrows coming alive, magical battles and witty conversations. It gets even more frantic especially near the end, where suddenly everything is connected to everything, and all the characters are together, and it takes a lot of figuring out to make sense of what actually happened. Things get tied up very neatly in the end. And this is the very few instances where I didn’t mind at all, since the conclusion was absolutely delightful. (Yes, I know I sound like a fawning fangirl. I can’t help it.)

It’s a story about a lot of things. It’s about coming of age, it’s about discovering yourself, it’s about love. All that is often lost to me, because of the irreverent humour, the fast-paced plot and me going SOPHIE AND HOWL 4EVA!1!! If I had to quote favourite portions from this book, I’d have to quote the whole book — that’s how much I love it.

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I’ve watched the Miyazaki film, yes. I loved it as well, but I prefer the book over the adaptation. I guess the book just makes more sense to me, that’s all.