By Lev Grossman
Howl's Moving Castle
By Diana Wynne Jones
My youngest child went through a phase earlier this year in which he would watch the Studio Ghibli movie "Howl's Moving Castle" three times a week, if not more. (Give me a break: It was during a long, incredibly cold Minnesota winter, and we were stuck in the house a lot. He would have watched it every day if we had let him.) He would talk about it all the time, too. He was especially taken with a scene in which "Howl turns into a bird." At bedtime, he would ask us to make up songs about the Witch of the Waste and sing them to him. He hadn't yet turned 3 when this started, and I think his re-watching was a way of trying to figure it out.Like all of Hayao Miyazaki movies, "Howl's Moving Castle" is absolutely beautiful to look at. It's also very strange. If it hadn't been for my son's obsessive re-watching of it, a lot of the plot would have gone over my head. Even after seeing it many times, I still didn't understand what was going on in a climactic scene near the end. My wife didn't understand this part either, so she read the book on which the movie was based. She said it's even weirder than the movie.
Eventually, I got around to reading the book and I see what she meant. Written by the English Diana Wynne Jones, it is so odd in parts that the movie looks downright straightforward in comparison. It is also strikingly different from the movie.
To summarize: "Howl's Moving Castle," in both the movie and book versions, is about Sophie, a young woman who is cursed by a nasty character called the Witch of the Waste. The curse turns Sophie into a very old woman. Not knowing what else to do, Sophie flees her home and ends up living in the bizarre moving castle of the wizard Howl, where she befriends his young apprentice and his fire demon, who goes by the name Calcifer. Although Sophie's curse doesn't allow her to tell people what happened to her, Calcifer sees that she is under a curse and offers to free her if she can break a contract between him and Howl. As with Sophie's curse, Calcifer is magically unable to talk about the details of his contract, so Sophie has to figure it out. Eventually, she does figure it out in a way that saves both Howl and Calcifer. Along the way, Sophie, who has always been dutiful and somewhat dour, finds that being an old woman liberates her from many of the social constraints that have frustrated her for most of her life.So, that bare outline is the same, more or less, in the two versions, but otherwise the book and movie are radically different. Miyazaki and company cut out huge sections of the novel and added more. Perhaps the most striking changes were to set the story during an air war and to have the Witch of the Waste lose her powers and come to live in the castle. Given that the witch is the primary villain throughout the novel, these new elements radically alter the story, making it less a story about two magicians at war than about one in which a wizard objects to war. (Although the world of "Howl's Moving Castle" looks European, it is hard to watch the bombing scenes without thinking of the World War II bombing of Japan.) It also gives a bigger part to the late Lauren Bacall, who lent her incomparable voice to the Witch in the English version of the movie.
Reading the book helped clarify the terms of Calcifer and Howl's contract for me, but it made me confused in many more ways. I enjoyed reading it, but at some point I just started letting the confusing details wash over me. The movie is the same way, but with amazing image after amazing image, it's somewhat easier to give in.
One of the most unforgettable images in the movie involves the door from inside Howl's castle. While the castle movies along on steampunk feet, it has access to several doors that remain stationary, accessible through the main door inside the castle. Howell turns a knob above the door handle to change where the door goes. Turn it to one color and the door opens to Porthaven, a town on the ocean. Turn it to another color and the door opens onto a street in Kingsbury, the capital city. Turn it to black and it opens to a strangely liquid blackness. It turns out this is a big part of the book, too.
Nothin' But a Good Time
Opening a door and stepping into another world is a part of another great classic, as well. I am, of course, referring to Poison's 1988 video for "Nothin' But a Good Time":I'm kidding. The door to another world I was thinking of belongs to a wardrobe in C.S. Lewis' Narnia books. Narnia is the unnamed but obvious inspiration for Fillory, the magical world in Lev Grossman's Magicians series.
I finished Lev Grossman's third and apparently final book in his Magicians series some months ago, but I haven't blogged about it until now because I wasn't sure until now what I wanted to say. I wrote about the first Magicians book a little while back and then the second after I read it earlier this year. The first book, "The Magicians," concerns a young man named Quentin Coldwater as he attends Brakebilles, a Hogwarts-like secret college of magic, and discovers a Narnia-like world called Fillory. The second, "The Magician King," largely concerns Quentin's friend Julia as she learns magic on her own, having been rejected from Brakebills. In the third, "The Magician's Land," Quentin, now exiled from Fillory, takes a teaching position at Brakebills for a while before being caught up in an adventure that ends up bringing him back to a Fillory that is in danger of literally falling apart.
In enjoyed the first two books in the series, especially in the way they played with the conventions of fantasy fiction. What if you really did graduate from Hogwarts? What would you do with the rest of your life? Wouldn't you get bored? What if you did live in Narnia? Wouldn't it drive you crazy? What if you did learn about magic through an underground circuit of magicians? What kind of sleazy people would you meet?
For this third book, Grossman is less interested in these intellectual exercises and just wants to tell a story. This makes it in some ways the most satisfying of the Magicians series, but in other ways the least interesting.
In the months leading up to the book's publication, in interviews and personal essays, Grossman spoke about coming to terms with the fantasy genre, growing into his role and personal identity as a fantasy writer. That theme carries over in the fiction. Early in "The Magician's Land," Quentin's father dies and Quentin rifles through his parent's home, trying to find evidence that his father was secretly a magician like him. It's a powerful image of a man trying to identify with his father and distinguish himself from him at the same time.
To Sir, With Love
Though Quentin is only 30 or so, he has been through a lot and his hair has prematurely turned white. It suits him. Back at Brakebills, he finds, after all his adventures, that his special magical skill is in fixing small objects. It's not a glamorous skill, but he enjoys teaching it and he settles into a role as professor that it seems he would be happy to hold for the next 40 years. Later in the book, Grossman introduces Plum, an expelled Brakebills student who is roughly the same age Quentin was during most of "The Magicians," and after the plot throws them into a partnership, I kept thinking the two would sleep with each other, just as Quentin slept with Poppy in "The Magician King." But Quentin takes an almost avuncular interest in Plum and in a few scenes in which other characters meet the pair of them, she is grossed out by their assumptions that the two are a couple.There is a romantic storyline in "The Magician's Land," but it's not a story of new love, it's much more grown up and difficult story of a damaged old love between Quentin and Alice, his girlfriend who (essentially) died in the first book.
The novel is largely about the act of creation, about writing fiction -- specifically writing fantasy fiction. And this presents some difficulties.
In "The Magicians," Grossman has one of the Brakebills professors warn students not to drive themselves crazy trying to figure out why or how magic works, just to learn how to use it. In "The Magician King," Grossman gives Quentin a view of reality as a kind of "Matrix"-like computer program, and presents magicians as hackers of that program. In "The Magician's Land," we sort of reach the limits of both approaches.
See, Quentin discovers through his magic hacking powers a way to create new worlds. And, if you can create new worlds, you can do anything. Why can't you also bring back the dead? If you're the writer/magician, you can do anything. Of course, you may find that that the dead person doesn't really want to come back and is still mad at something you did back when you were young.
Actually putting it down like this makes the allegory sound rather obvious (on io9.com and other fantasy-geek blogs these days, there is a lot of talk about "world creation" as the key to making good fantasy or sci-fi) but it works pretty well. If you like fantasy fiction, you will like the book.
Me? I enjoyed it while I was reading it, but it didn't stay with me the way the other two books did. Like I said, I wasn't sure what I thought and why it was that this book left me unsatisfied, but recently, when Slate had a podcast about the book, two of the speakers said that the big magical acts in the book -- bringing back the dead and saving a world -- made everything seem kind of easy.
The big tragedies that befell Alice and Julia in the first two books end up seeming like no big deal if you can just wave a wand and make them (mostly) all better. To his credit, Grossman explores the implications here, especially with Alice and Quentin, but I was left thinking that magic needs limitations to make it more interesting.
In the first book of the series, Quentin visits Alice's parents. It's the first time he's met an adult magician couple in their own element and he finds them painfully bored and unhappy. They have transformed their house and their appearance to resemble Ancient Romans, just because they need something new. It's not enough. Their magical powers allow them to do almost anything, and this means they don't have struggle against anything, or care much about anything.
When I first read that part of the book, I thought it was a brilliant takedown of the Harry Potter world. If you can disapparate and reapparate anywhere and use little spells to do almost all your work, how are you going to be satisfied with a dull life at the Ministry of Magic? After reading "The Magician's Land" however, I thought of that bored couple again. What if they represented not fantasy characters, but fantasy writers? If you have no limits, your freedom seems like another trap.