Diana Wynne Jones, Castle in the Air (1990; London: Collins, 2001), 285pp. ★★★ (3 stars)

Pleasant but insubstantial sequel to Howl’s Moving Castle, with an Arabian Nights flavour.

This sequel to Howl’s Moving Castle begins at quite a distance from its predecessor’s very English setting in the Kingdom of Ingary. Its hero, Abdullah, hails from a world rich in the middle-eastern clichés of the Arabian Nights, and takes his sweet time making it to an intersection with the characters of Howl’s Moving Castle in Ingary’s capital, Kingsbury.

Castle in the Air has the same whimsical and random air as Howl’s Moving Castle, albeit with less sense of their being any substance behind it. There is, however, some beautiful prose, such as this description of the eponymous’ castle’s surroundings:

When the carpet bobbed up lighter and they had a chance to look around, they gasped again. For here were the islands and promontories and bays of dim gold that Abdullah had seen in the sunset, spreading out from beside them into the far silver distance, where they lay hushed and still and enchanted like a vista of paradise itself. The pellucid waves broke on the cloud shore with only the faintest of whispers, which seemed to add to the silence. (215)

It is sprinkled, too, with wry womanly wisdom such as the observation that “men who [eschew kissing and] do nothing but make fine speeches make very poor husbands.” (249) But although the feminine strength of Flower-in-the-Night recalls Sophie’s elderly tenacity in Howl’s Moving Castle, this book is far less rich in the wisdom department, and the poorer for being without the earlier book’s romantic triangles.

This movie is the sequel to Linklater’s earlier Before Sunrise (1995), in which Jesse (Ethan Hawke), an American, meets young a young French woman, Celine (Julie Delpy), on a train to Vienna, and spends a night with her before they have to part ways.

At the end of that film, Jesse and Celine made plans to meet each other in Vienna again in six months. As we soon discover, Jesse returned for the meeting, but Celine, though she wanted to, could not. So nearly ten years have passed before they meet again, Celine appearing at a bookshop where Jesse is promoting his bestselling novel, a mostly autobiographical account of their night together.

Like Before Sunrise, this movie is a conversation with a time limit. Jesse now has to catch a plane out of Paris just hours after meeting Celine again, and they have only until then to talk about their lives since they last met, and to deal with what that meeting had meant to them both. For the most part, their conversation is crushingly but realistically banal and evasive. They talk about their jobs, their relationships, and skirt around what is the real issue: how they feel about each other now they have finally met again.

It’s only when their time is running out that they each reveal the extent to which the memory of their one night together has destroyed their ability to love anyone else. Jesse hints repeatedly at the lack of love in his marriage, and how he is only bound to it out of a sense of duty to his young son. Delpy unconvincingly portrays Celine’s sudden burst of anger on the car-ride to her apartment, in which she blames Jesse for her string of superficial relationships with other men. They ascend the stairs to her room, ostensibly so that Celine can play Jesse one the songs she has written, in a silence punctuated by glances that speak of the unacknowledged inevitability of their becoming lovers one more time. Finally, when Celine breaks out her guitar and sings a song about how a man she met one night was everything she ever wanted, Delpy’s sweet, warm voice breaks out of the banality entirely with an elegiac testimony to her love for Jesse that is entirely free of bitterness about never having seen him again.

Finally, a few words passed between them, ending the film, show them both acknowledging Jesse is going to miss his plane: that because of what they have revealed, they are going to leave their relationships for each other. It’s a pleasing change from the similar resolution of the chance meeting in Lost in Translation (2003), where Bob (Bill Murray) goes back to his deadening home-life despite having made an enlivening connection with both Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) and Tôkyô.

Before Sunset is not a visually interesting movie, and, as I said, the conversation that drives the movie is mostly banal. The film isn’t meritorious in itself, but rather as a sequel. Those who haven’t seen Before Sunrise are advised to see it first or stay away. For those with the necessary background, though, Before Sunset is a thoughtful and affecting wrap-up of the story that Linklater left unfinished back in 1995.

This game spent a long time on my “currently reading” pile (okay, so you don’t read a videogame, but there are books on that pile, too), unplayed, and then the latest issue of Edge (#146) published a reminiscence on the game and gave away the ending, in which the hero rewinds time to the game’s beginning in order to avert the death of a lover who will no longer remember him. But Edge has gushed about The Sands of Time for ages, giving it a 9/10 in the review, talking about it ever since, and finally complaining about how the developers turned the Prince from a BBC-accented aristocrat into a trash-talking bad-boy for this game’s ‘edgier’ sequel: Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within, and this reminiscence was no different. How could I fail to be affected? After all, I hadn’t left the game alone because it was bad: I just had other things to do. I didn’t feel like doing any writing yesterday, so I picked it up again.

Now that I think about it, I played it pretty much all day: from about 08:30 to 23:30, when I finished it. There was a small break to play with Ubuntu Hoary, decide to repartition my Powerbook’s HD to get rid of it (see Wiping Linux off my HD), to cook dinner, and talk to my Dad, who stopped by, but for the most part, yesterday was just a big block of videogaming.

I never liked the original Prince of Persia, or Prince of Persia 2, for that matter. They lacked pace, the swordfighting was too difficult for my early-teenaged brain and its mediocre fine-motor skills, and as with many action games of the time, their plots were so thin you could measure their depth in nanometres. When I heard that the series’ IP was being resurrected, I thought the new game was going to be as lame as when Infogrames renamed themselves Atari.

But The Sands of Time is different. Unlike Infogrames, who seem to have forgotten that Atari went down like the Hindenburg in a massive videogame-market crash over 1982-83, The Sands of Time’s developers have noted of the lessons of history. It’s a contemporary game, and it borrows well from some of the finest titles of recent times.

This game, like its eponymous hero, is a bit of a thief, but it is at least a discerning and skilled one. In large part, The Sands of Time is a rip-off of Ico, which is itself sort of an updated version of the original Prince of Persia . The game takes place in a single, if massive and labyrinthine, locale which gives the game most of its charm, and its hero, like Ico’s, has occasionally to protect an only somewhat helpful female companion. The game also steals from the Blood Omen series, adopting its practice of having the hero give often snide voice-overs that indicate how he perceives his world, what he thinks of the people within it, and what he’s currently doing. This last feature is an elegant rebuttal of the implications of Jesper Juul and Markku Eskelinen’s arguments in the first issue of Game Sudies: that interactivity and narration are mutually exclusive. Sure, you can’t rewrite the dialogue, and it doesn’t change as a result of your in-game choices, but this is a narrative game: the hero narrates it while you play, usually without interrupting the action. Fortunately, the narration is witty, subtle, and in the end, touching.

One of the greatest pleasures of videogaming is exploring finely crafted imaginary worlds, and The Sands of Time excels in this area. Pushing on towards the end around 22:30 last night, with the Prince climbing the Tower of Dawn, I really started to remember what it’s like to be awake in the early morning, seeing a sunrise and breathing crisp air while you’re concentrating on something more pressing. Together with the fine narration, and controls that allow the player to execute the Prince’s acrobatics effortlessly, environments such as these (see the screenshot below) make the game feel like a finely crafted work of art.

It is, of course, flawed in parts. Battles can be too long, and the fact that enemies will respawn until you kill a number of them that the game knows, but that you don’t, means that repeated death can leave you without hope that you’ll ever get past a fight sequence. Climbing the Tower of Dawn at the end, without the Dagger of Time that lets you rewind to avoid death, also results in a final platforming sequence in which you are repeatedly sent back to the last save point without any idea how far you were from the next one when you died. I did, however, experience no problems with the famous difficulty spike which occurs early in the game when fighting the Prince’s zombified father, and which reportedly caused many players to give up permanently (well, at least according to Edge).

I’m glad my videogaming prowess is better than it was in the days when I was defeated by the early levels of the original Prince of Persia.

8/10.