"Howl's Moving Castle"

[fiefoe]

Narrator Jenny Sterlin's cranky old lady voice as Sophie is really enjoyable. The plot is way more complicated than I remembered, and Diana Wynne Jones constantly sidestepped the reader's expectations -- a nice stepmother who turned out to be evil but then maybe not, for instance.

• “Nothing,” Sophie said uncomfortably. “We’ve been rather busy. You shouldn’t talk about Fanny that way, Martha. She is your mother.”
  “Yes, and I’m enough like her to understand her,” Martha retorted. “That’s why she sent me so far away, or tried to. Mother knows you don’t have to be unkind to someone in order to exploit them. She knows how dutiful you are. She knows you have this thing about being a failure because you’re only the eldest.
• Sophie’s eyes went to the lady’s wide hat first—real ostrich plume dyed to reflect the pinks and greens and blues winking in the diamonds and yet still look black. This was a wealthy hat. The lady’s face was carefully beautiful.
• “Don’t worry, old thing,” Sophie said to the face. “You look quite healthy. Besides, this is much more like you really are.”
  She thought about her situation, quite calmly. Everything seemed to have gone calm and remote. She was not even particularly angry with the Witch of the Waste.
  “Well, of course I shall have to do for her when I get the chance,” she told herself, “but meanwhile, if Lettie and Martha can stand being one another, I can stand being like this.
• but in fact her main thought was, Good gracious! Wizard Howl is only a child in his twenties, for all his wickedness! It made such a difference to be old, she thought as she turned the bacon over in the pan. And she would have died rather than let this overdressed boy know she was the girl he had pitied on May Day.
• Then she tacked an old sheet to the beams nearest the fireplace and forced Calcifer to bend his head down while she swept the chimney. Calcifer hated that. He crackled with mean laughter when Sophie discovered that soot had got all over the room and she had to clean it all again. That was Sophie’s trouble. She was remorseless, but she lacked method. But there was this method to her remorselessness: she calculated that she could not clean this thoroughly without sooner or later coming across Howl’s hidden hoard of girls’ souls, or chewed hearts—or else something that explained Calcifer’s contract.
• Sophie sewed buttons on Michael’s shirts and listened to Howl going through a spell with Michael. “I know I’m slapdash,” he was saying, “but there’s no need for you to copy me. Always read it right through, carefully, first. The shape of it should tell you a lot, whether it’s self-fulfilling, or self-discovering, or simple incantation, or mixed action and speech. When you’ve decided that, go through again and decide which bits mean what they say and which bits are put as a puzzle. You’re getting on to the more powerful kinds now. You’ll find every spell of power has at least one deliberate mistake or mystery in it to prevent accidents. You have to spot those.
• Howl stopped with his hand on the knob above the door. “Aches and pains troubling you?” he said. “Or has something annoyed you?”
  “Annoyed?” said Sophie. “Why should I be annoyed? Someone only filled the castle with rotten aspic, and deafened everyone in Porthaven, and scared Calcifer to a cinder, and broke a few hundred hearts. Why should that annoy me?”
• Zip! The landscape instantly rushed past them so fast it was only a blur, a gray-green blur for the land and a blue-gray blur for the sky. The wind of their going tore at Sophie’s hair and dragged every wrinkle in her face backward until she thought she would arrive with half her face behind each ear.
• “Don’t put that foot down!” Michael yelled, too late.
  There was another zipping blur and more rushing wind. When it stopped, Sophie found herself right down the Folding Valley, almost into Marsh Folding. “Oh, drat!” she said, and hopped carefully round on her shoe and tried again.
  Zip! Blur. And she was back on Upper Folding green again, staggering forward with the weight of the boot. She had a glimpse of Michael diving to catch her—
• “You have an instinct, Sophie, that’s how,” said Howl. “Nothing is safe from you. If I were to court a girl who lived on an iceberg in the middle of an ocean, sooner or later—probably sooner—I’d look up to see you swooping overhead on a broomstick. In fact, by now I’d be disappointed in you if I didn’t see you.”
• “What ingratitude!” Howl exclaimed, spreading out both arms. “Let’s have green slime again! After which I shall be forced to move the castle a thousand miles away and never see my lovely Lettie again!”
  Michael looked at Sophie imploringly. Sophie glowered. She saw well enough that the happiness of both her sisters depended on her agreeing to see the King. With green slime in reserve. “You haven’t asked me to do anything yet,” she said. “You’ve just said I’m going to.”
• Both boys looked at it. Neil said, “It’s a poem,” in the way most people would say, “It’s a dead rat.”
  “It’s the one Miss Angorian set for last week’s homework,” said the other boy. “I remember ‘wind’ and ‘finned.’ It’s about submarines.”
• “… never doing an honest day’s work, never getting a job I could be proud of, bringing shame on me and Gareth, coming here and spoiling Mari rotten,” Megan ground on remorselessly.
  Sophie pushed Michael aside and stumped downstairs, looking as stately as she could manage. “Come, Howl,” she said grandly. “We really must be on our way. While we stand here, money is ticking away and your servants are probably selling the gold plate. So nice to meet you,” she said to Megan as she arrived at the foot of the stairs, “but we must rush. Howl is such a busy man.”
• They tell me she was not wicked once—though I have this only on hearsay, since she is older than either of us and keeps herself young by her arts. Howell has gifts in the same order as hers. It seems as if those of high ability cannot resist some extra, dangerous stroke of cleverness, which results in a fatal flaw and begins a slow decline to evil.
• Sophie felt his forehead. “You do have a bit of a fever,” she admitted.
  “I’m delirious,” said Howl. “Spots are crawling before my eyes.”
  “Those are spiders,” said Sophie. “Why can’t you cure yourself with a spell?”
  “Because there is no cure for a cold,” Howl said dolefully.


• He set off with dignity to the bathroom, wading in blue-and-silver suit. The rest of the blue-and-silver suit followed him, dragging step by step down the stairs and rustling across the floor. By the time Howl was in the bathroom, most of the jacket was on the ground floor and the trousers were appearing on the stairs. Howl half shut the bathroom door and seemed to go on hauling the suit in hand over hand. Sophie and Michael and the dog-man stood and watched yard after yard of blue or silver fabric proceed across the floor, decorated with an occasional silver button the size of a millstone and enormous, regular, ropelike stitches. There may have been nearly a mile of it.
  “I don’t think I got that spell quite right,” Michael said when the last huge scalloped edge had disappeared round the bathroom door.
• He picked the guitar up and tuned it. He had it sounding much nicer in seconds.
  “My sorrow revealed,” Howl said pathetically. “I was born an unmusical Welshman.
• Howl went to the door and stopped with his hand on the knob. “Sophie, are you still not talking to me?” he asked miserably.
  Sophie knew Howl could sound unhappy in heaven if it suited him.
• “Red gold,” Sophie said. Not much had changed about Howl that she could see, now he had his heart back, except maybe that his eyes seemed a deeper color—more like eyes and less like glass marbles. “Unlike some people’s,” she said, “it’s natural.”
  “I’ve never seen why people put such value on things being natural,” Howl said, and Sophie knew then that he was scarcely changed at all.