I love the spooky season, but sometimes, when it becomes combined with a variety of stressful life factors, it becomes a bit hard to get through. Add in the fact that I decided to cram in a horror/Halloween movie every day during the month of October and attend a spooky event every weekend, and I think I might have oversaturated myself with intense or dark content. And, yeah, some of that content got too deep into my head and it became hard to dig myself out of that dark emotional place.
Until suddenly, I realized something.
I don’t need to CRAM only spooky content into my head during October. Sure, this time of year only comes once, but there is only so much blood, guts, and ghosts you can take before you start to hate everything.
And you know what, if you feel like re-reading a story that you have not read since you were ten years old, and it has absolutely zip to do with Halloween, but it’s got so much nostalgic whimsy and simple childhood magic that it finally breaks you out of the spooky season time loop…so be it.
Ten-year-old William Lawrence is shocked to learn that his long-time nanny, Mrs. Phillips, is moving back to England. Before she departs, she gifts William with an old family toy: a huge model castle that comes with a two-inch-tall knight figure. William, a lover of Arthurian stories, is ecstatic to receive the toy. But he is just as shocked to learn that the knight figure is actually alive. His name is Sir Simon, he comes from a land of knights, dragons, wizards, and princesses, and he is under a magic spell from a wicked sorcerer. Thus begins a strange but fantastical friendship as William learns more about Sir Simon’s world, and how Mrs. Phillips might be able to remain with his family.
Like I said, I have not read this book since I was around ten years old. I’ve thought about it a few times since then, but somehow, it popped into my head when I realized how starved for whimsy I was. I also picked it because the stakes were low, the adventure was simple, and the friendship between a young boy and a magic knight felt like a wholesome turnaround from all the serial killers and murder stories I’d heard since September.
The Castle in the Attic is almost a carbon copy of Lynne Reid Banks’ The Indian in the Cupboard. Let’s see. In both stories, you have a young boy who receives a magical object, which contains a small human figure that comes to life and strikes up a friendship with the boy, taking him on a magical journey of self-discovery; heck, the two titles are similar enough to get mixed up. Now, I’ve only ever seen the 90s film version of Indian, so I cannot draw up too many specific comparisons between the stories. But they both came out in the 1980s, so it would not surprise me if Ms. Winthrop took inspiration from Indian.
Frankly, I like the story of Castle better, if only because it contains more of my personal interests, such as knights, castles, and other general fairy tale characters and tropes.
The Castle in the Attic is indeed a simple fantasy story, with relatively few twists, turns, or shocks, but it still has the charm of a bedtime story. And there’s some comfort to be found in that. It was nice to rediscover this story, and remembering how a younger me must have felt when reading it.
What I like most is that, although the story is as simple archetypal fantasy as you can get, the characters have life and energy to them. William, the main character, may only have a few characteristics, but he talks and acts like a ten-year-old boy, being a bit of a show-off and making dumb but well-meaning mistakes, as kids do. Sir Simon does nothing to stick out from other fairytale knights, but I’ve always loved the archetypal knight character—a person who lives their life by a strict chivalric code and treats everyone they meet with the utmost care and respect—so I liked him almost immediately. Even the wizard villain, Alastor, has his charm as a truly evil and careless man.
Naturally, William has to take a magical journey in order to save Sir Simon and his kingdom, and, while it’s not the most original journey (it does involve avoiding the temptation of eating an apple and defeating a dragon), I still cannot fault it for being so fun and familiar. Like I said, it comes back to this whole story feeling like a fairy tale you’d tell children at bedtime. It has everything that a child who loves fantasy would love, and it’s a safe, wholesome story to spend time in.
There is actually one more reason that I thought of this book, and consequently had fun living in it for a while.
Last November, my boyfriend and I took a trip to Chicago, where we visited the Museum of Science and Industry, which contains a whole gallery dedicated to the Colleen Moore Fairy Tale Castle. Throughout this whole book, my mind kept flashing back to that model of a grand, idyllic vision of a fairy tale castle, and I kept imagining what it would be like to wander through that model like William and Sir Simon wander through the attic castle. Seriously, look the castle up on Google; every single room has a million fairy tale Easter eggs and so many details that you’ll find something new every time you look. And it’s honest to God one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.
It’s shocking that The Castle in the Attic never got a film adaptation, because it would be a nice call-back to other children’s fantasy novels of the late twentieth century. In this day and age, we need more stories about ordinary kids going on adventures where they discover universal truths, and just reveling in some classic fantasy fun, rather than trying to push another message about how hard life is and what a crap job humanity has done so far. Again, this book may be simple, but it’s just such a nice burst of magic, adventure, and childhood whimsy that deserves way more attention than it gets.
The Library Key 