Cornflower Book Group

Reading Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle was - for me - like looking at a beautiful piece of old chintz: there are patches where the glaze still holds and it shines, parts which are faded, where the colours are washed to a mellowness, some bits worn threadbare and elsewhere areas which are still crisp and intensely vivid. There is texture to touch and pattern for the eye to follow, and with so much richness I was quickly drawn into the book's shabbily comfortable world and wanted nothing more than to linger there.

All in all I found it romantic, eccentric, charming, spirited, quaint, nostalgic, magical and mad! I can see why Ralph Vaughan Williams named it as his book of the year in 1949, and Christopher Isherwood said "you can live in it, like Dickens". I can see just as clearly how 'the wrong reader', if I may put it that way, would be irritated - though not bored, I should think - mystified by its enormous success and puzzled by its characters' responses to the situations in which they find themselves.

Which camp are you in?

(The book's cake, by the way, is here).