Dodie Smith: I Capture the Castle

Reviewed by LINDA HERRICK

Too many years ago, a "teenage" novel called I Capture the Castle found a permanent place in my heart. The details faded, but what excitement to hear Castle has finally been made into a film after years of the rights being tied up by Disney. Thank goodness it's been made by the BBC and a bunch of Brits; its potential Americanisation would have been deadly.

And so the well-reviewed film - set for a Rialto season at the end of July - has rekindled my deep fondness for the book, which has never been out of print since 1949, the first novel of the author best-known for her classic 101 Dalmatians.

But would the misty-eyed memory of a teenage "crush", so to speak, live up to the colder eye of the adult upon a revisit? Yes. And much more. The novel, which opens with a phrase credited as one of the best in all 20th-century fiction - "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink" - is still a cracker, in fact, possibly even more delightful than last time around.

Baldly, Castle is about the misfortunes of the Mortmain family during the 1930s, as they live in absolute poverty in a cold and dangerously ruinous rented 14th-century castle in the middle of the English countryside. One-shot famous writer father James, once jailed for threatening his wife with a cake-knife, has had writer's block for years and spends most of his time in his freezing study reading detective novels. He is now married to much younger artist's model Topaz, and his two teenage daughters Cassandra - who narrates the tale - and Rose have no worldly experience and few expectations in life.

Rose is obsessively depressed about the family's lack of money and threatens to go on the streets, not a viable prospect in the depths of Suffolk, Cassandra reminds her.

But then the arrival of a filthy rich American family in the neighbourhood, complete with two young eligible sons, throws Rose into a frenzy of plotting, with repercussions no one could predict.

This inadequate summary can go nowhere towards doing justice to the book's unsentimental wit, descriptive range and the irresistible drive of its narrative.

But you don't need to listen to me. Just note that it's a lifelong favourite of Antonia Fraser, J.K. Rowling and Penelope Lively. And Oprah - who discovered it a few years back and wanted to make it her book of the month, until she discovered the author was dead.

Red Fox-Random House, $19.95

* Linda Herrick is the Herald Arts Editor