On and on, I plod along
Dec. 10th, 2007 07:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blodeueddToday is not a double feature, because I'm feeling lazy.
Howl's Moving Castle (Diana Wynne Jones)
M-P lent me this while I was back home over the summer. I'd been wanting to for a while, ever since I'd seen the Miyazaki movie last year, and I'm really glad that my intuition -- that the book was much better than the movie -- was correct. One thing that had really bothered me in the movie was the subplot about the war. It felt out of place, tacked on, as though Miyazaki had simply wanted to shoehorn his pet topics into the story, regardless of their effect. In the book, there is no war, in fact, only battles between sorcerers. Likewise, there's much less scheming, it seems, and the motivations of the characters seem much more straightforward.
There are so many things going on in the story that don't make much sense that it's a relief when, at the end, we're told what's going on and shown how the problem was Sophie's lack of understanding, not our own. I especially liked how Sophie's own resignation and self-centredness had blinded her to the fact that Howl really had tried to help her.
Overall, this was a quick, charming read, and I'm sure a younger me would have enjoyed it just as much. The idea of "sewing magic" tickled my fancy, of course, as did Sophie talking to the hats. The only things I thought didn't work as well were the character of Fanny (Sophie's stepmother, who was not given any real personality that I could see), and I still don't really understand why the two sisters had to pretend to be each other instead of switching places to begin with, once they'd found they were unsuited to their original apprenticeships. Was it simply to avoid hurting Fanny, or was there some kind of contract, magical or otherwise, that they weren't supposed to break?
Final verdict: 8.5/10
Howl's Moving Castle (Diana Wynne Jones)
M-P lent me this while I was back home over the summer. I'd been wanting to for a while, ever since I'd seen the Miyazaki movie last year, and I'm really glad that my intuition -- that the book was much better than the movie -- was correct. One thing that had really bothered me in the movie was the subplot about the war. It felt out of place, tacked on, as though Miyazaki had simply wanted to shoehorn his pet topics into the story, regardless of their effect. In the book, there is no war, in fact, only battles between sorcerers. Likewise, there's much less scheming, it seems, and the motivations of the characters seem much more straightforward.
There are so many things going on in the story that don't make much sense that it's a relief when, at the end, we're told what's going on and shown how the problem was Sophie's lack of understanding, not our own. I especially liked how Sophie's own resignation and self-centredness had blinded her to the fact that Howl really had tried to help her.
Overall, this was a quick, charming read, and I'm sure a younger me would have enjoyed it just as much. The idea of "sewing magic" tickled my fancy, of course, as did Sophie talking to the hats. The only things I thought didn't work as well were the character of Fanny (Sophie's stepmother, who was not given any real personality that I could see), and I still don't really understand why the two sisters had to pretend to be each other instead of switching places to begin with, once they'd found they were unsuited to their original apprenticeships. Was it simply to avoid hurting Fanny, or was there some kind of contract, magical or otherwise, that they weren't supposed to break?
Final verdict: 8.5/10
