Howl’s Moving Castle Postmortem

I’ll start with a slightly morbid confession: I heard about Howl’s Moving Castle because its author, Diana Wynne Jones, died. It happened four and a half months ago, and there was this flood of articles about what a wonderful author she was, and all the happy childhood memories she had created for people. She – and this book – received so much praise that I thought I’d better take note. I added it to my list.

(I should probably clarify at this point that the “Postmortem” in the blog post title refers merely to the book. No need to be any more morbid than necessary.)

Anyway, about a week ago, I finally began reading Howl’s Moving Castle, with high expectations. Maybe too high.

Because I’ll be honest: I lost interest and stopped reading halfway through.

To explain why, I’ll start by explaining what’s good about the book, because it does have a lot going for it. It opens with this wonderful first sentence:

In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three.

This suggests a world full magic and adventure, and on that score, the novel pretty much delivers. In addition to the seven-league boots (which you get to see in action) there is a Witch of the Waste, a fiery demon, a lively scarecrow, and of course the wizard Howl and his moving castle. So worldbuilding really wasn’t a problem.

The characters were good too. The main character, Sophie – who starts off as a young girl and gets transformed into an old woman – is fun to read, especially when you see how much her external change influences her thinking. Howl is also well-done: powerful enough to be intimidating, flawed enough to be human. I found myself caring less about Sophie’s sisters, but they were minor characters so it wasn’t a big deal.

Good world, good characters, and – I’ll add – good writing in general. So what’s left?

Ah, yeah. Plot. Or rather, lack of it.

The problem with the book, and the reason I stopped reading, is that there just isn’t that much going on. Let’s see, we’ve got the Witch of the Waste, who placed the aforementioned hex on Sophie; but the Witch doesn’t rear her head again for a while, and Sophie seems pretty much fine with her curse, so that’s not a big deal. We’ve got Howl himself, who also turns out to be much less scary than we’re initially led to believe. We’ve got an animated scarecrow who chases them a couple times but doesn’t really do anything. And we’ve got Howl courting one of Sophie’s sisters, which upsets Sophie quite a lot but doesn’t seem to matter to anybody else (including the sister).

A non-scary witch, a non-scary wizard, a non-scary scarecrow, and a non-problematic love affair. Unfortunately, this is pretty much it in the plot department – or at least it was halfway through the book, where I stopped reading.

I’ve mentioned before that I have a history of disliking beloved stories. American Gods did nothing for me especially, The Name of the Wind seemed tiresome, and I loathed The Last Unicorn. I’d say Howl’s Moving Castle was better than those three, but in the end, it just felt like it didn’t have any get-up-and-go. No disrespect, of course, to any of those authors, Diana Wynne Jones included; I simply didn’t love the books.

Have any of you read it? Care to share your own feelings?

Personally, I’m on to Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, which is beautifully written but seems to suffer from the same problem: no forward motion to the plot. I’m only about fifty pages in, so I’ll give it more time.