Howl's Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones (Howl's Castle #1)

Howl's Moving Castle is a book that has been on my radar for ages--since plenty before the movie--but which I have never read.  I had the sequel, Castle in the Air, that I bought at a discount bookstore at some point, and then never read because I realized it wasn't the first book in a series after I had already obtained it.  Eventually, I saw the Miyazaki adaptation, which is an absolutely beautiful film.  It has beautiful imagery and the characters are wonderful.  However, I had always found the movie's biggest weakness to be that it lacked a tightness of plot.  Things happened, but there was never a sense of how or why.  With that in mind, and knowing in advance that the book and the movie were going to vary to a pretty decent degree--much like the book and movie versions of Stardust--I was excited to see what the original story had in store.

The bones of the story and movie are much the same: Sophie Hatter is turned into an old woman because she annoys a witch, and exiles herself to the wilds beyond her town where she encounters Howl's moving castle, enters, and strikes a deal with the fire demon Calcifer that he will break her curse if she will find a way to get him out of the mysterious contract he has with Howl.  Beyond that, there are great differences, and so many instances of, "Oh, that's why that happened" that weren't clear in the film.  The feel of the two is definitely the same--the movie is more centered around a random war and Howl's decreasing humanity as he shapeshifts, whereas the book is more focused on the conflict with the Witch of the Waste and Sophie coming into her own instead of writing herself off as just the eldest sister, but the feel of both mediums matches, and to those who liked the beauty and whimsy of the movie, the book is equally suitable.  The book just makes so much more sense than the movie does, as well.  Character motivations and subplots are fleshed out, the world feels more complete, and all of the best moments of the movie--"May all your bacon burn"--are present and accounted for.

Now, for the usual book things.  This book has a fairly steady, sedate pace throughout, but things pick up quite abruptly at the end.  It did have a bit of a strange feel to it--Sophie and Michael and Howl have been drifting along for so long, occasionally tangling with others bust mostly working out their own inner dynamics, and suddenly BAM! there's a room full of people and an angry fire demon and trips across the desert and a curse coming true.  Additionally, Sophie and Howl's developing feelings for each other didn't feel real throughout.  Now, this is a book that was written for a young audience.  I certainly didn't expect a steamy romance from it.  However, I've read plenty of other books for young readers that had relationships in them that felt real and genuine and present without anyone needing to do any steamy scenes or even really any kissing--A College of Magics comes immediately to mind there.  Sophie and Howl just felt distant, and their relationship at the end of the book didn't really feel too different from the beginning.  The dual-world setup feels a bit strange, and I couldn't put my finger on why Jones decided to go that route--would having Howl's family in the same world really have made that much of a difference?  (And how did that woman get there, anyway???)  And finally, Sophie is more annoying here.  She's resigned to being a failure because she's the eldest, even when everyone around her is obviously overturning cliches, and at the same time she--an otherwise relatively sensible person--assumes that she knows more about magic than the actual magicians running around her.  All together, though, I still really, really liked this; the issues seem a bit bigger upon reflection but didn't really tarnish the reading experience at all.

It's always strange to read a book after you've seen its film adaptation; it has a kind of cognitive dissonance to it, where things are mostly as you'd expect, but slightly off, and we frequently have a default affection for the medium in which we first view something.  But in this case, the book is definitely stronger.  Miyazaki's version will remain my second favorite Ghibli movie (behind Spirited Away, of course), but I so, so enjoyed discovering this in book form, and I look forward to finally reading that sequel!  (And that sequel's sequel.)

4 stars out of 5.