A train to catch

Title: Trip to the North Pole
Author: Ellen Weiss • Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Price: ¥672 • ISBN: 0-618-47790-X

‘Tis a complicated world we live in and no mistake. Trip to the North Pole is a novelisation of the film script of The Polar Express (coming to a theatre near you sometime within the next few minutes), which in turn is based on an illustrated book by Chris Van Allsburgh — so the picture book became a motion picture which in turn became a book without pictures (well, apart from eight pages of movie stills). All this modernity is too much for me, which, coincidentally, is almost the theme of the story.

It is 1955, a simpler time. The Boy, the hero of the story, is doing something complicated: he is doubting Father Christmas. Does he exist?

The Boy is doubting magic itself and is forming the suspicion that his mum and dad are responsible for the Crimbo prezzies and everything.
Of course we all know Santa does exist and it is only obtuse little boys in children’s stories that question his existence — but without human folly there wouldn’t be much fiction, would there. Our little Doubting Thomas must be led back to the faith.

As it happens, Father Christmas’s network gets to hear of the Boy’s impending apostasy and pay him a little midnight visit — in a magical steam train with a jolly conductor who likes to say “I’ve got a schedule, ya know,” to anyone who will listen.

The train is full of kindred spirits, kids who are all at that doubting time of life, who are collected one by one and taken to the North Pole. I assumed, after the midnight visit and the train and all, that the kids were being shipped to some frozen Gulag until they saw the error of their ways, but no, the North Pole is where the answers to their questions can be found.

A castle to catch

Title: Howl’s Moving Castle
Author: Diana Wynne Jones • Publisher: Harper Trophy
Price: ¥966 • ISBN: 0-06-441034-X

One of the few compensations of ageing is getting to that stage where you can be as cantankerous as you like and say anything you want without really caring what people think. Sophie is at that stage and is finding the outspokenness of the aged a great advantage, but she is not enjoying it a little bit.

You see, she has skipped the growing old bit; she has gone straight from being young and fresh with all her life ahead of her to being old and hooped and very rickety indeed with nothing in between.
She has been cursed by a witch — and cursed for the good reason that the witch just thought Sophie was over-endowed with a talent for making hats.

Sophie is stuck in the family hatmaking business and watches while her luckier peers and siblings begin to make lives for themselves. Is she a little resentful? Well, she does start talking to the hats.

A moving castle has appeared on the outskirts of town pouring smoke into the sky — a pretty intimida-ting place owned by one Wizard Howl who, rumour has it, likes to suck the souls out of young women.

Then Sophie falls foul of the witch and is turned into an old biddy. It seems that the only way to lift the curse is to get into the moving castle where she meets Wizard Howl and learns that the castle is maintained by a magical fire called Calcifer who is also a victim of the witch. And then things get complicated. Howl’s moving castle is the fantasy novel on which this season’s Japanese animation event Haoru no Ugoku Shiro is based, and like so much quality fiction for children is utterly engrossing for adults too.

Book Reviews by Chris Page

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