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There is a particular kind of enchantment that Diana Wynne Jones casts across her 1986 fairy-tale novel, and it is the enchantment of a writer having a great deal of fun with the rules while quietly dismantling them. The premise announces the mischief immediately. Sophie Hatter, eldest of three daughters in the kingdom of Ingary, has been raised to believe that being eldest means being doomed to fail first. Her prospects are a hat shop and the slow accumulation of disappointment. When the Witch of the Waste walks in and curses her into the body of a ninety-year-old woman, Sophie finally escapes both the shop and, more interestingly, herself.

The conceit is the cleverest thing in the book. As a young woman Sophie was meek, dutiful and self-effacing; as an old woman she is free to be blunt, nosey, commanding and magnificently uninterested in what anyone thinks of her. The curse is a disguise, and the disguise is the truth. When she installs herself as a cleaning lady in the peripatetic castle of the notorious Wizard Howl, she is no longer a fairy-tale victim but something closer to a fairy godmother with a walking stick and an attitude problem.

Howl himself is a marvellous creation: a vain, fickle, green-slime-prone Welshman (originally Howell Jenkins, fled inexplicably from modern-day Wales) whose reputation for eating the hearts of beautiful young women turns out to be a rumour he spreads himself to avoid work. He shares his castle with Michael, a sweet and competent apprentice who handles most of the actual business, and Calcifer, a snarky fire demon bound to Howl by a contract neither of them can quite escape. The four of them form one of the most endearing found families in children's fantasy, and the scenes of Sophie bullying the castle into cleanliness while Howl sulks over a bad haircut have a warmth and comic timing that hold up beautifully on rereading.

The book is not flawless. Its middle section is famously meandering, preferring domesticity and small incident to forward momentum. Whole chapters pass in which nothing much happens beyond a cold, a wandering dog, a scarecrow chasing the castle. The world-building is gestural rather than thorough, and Howl's origins in Wales are teased without ever being properly explored. The final chapter resolves a dozen plot threads and pairs off half the cast at a pace that feels less like climax than like tidying-up.

And yet. On a second reading it becomes clear how tightly the apparent looseness is wound. A discarded walking stick, a propped-up scarecrow, a stray line from a John Donne poem: every offhand detail turns out to matter. Jones is writing a spell as much as a novel, and like the best spells it keeps paying out the longer you sit with it. Forty years on, Howl's Moving Castle remains funny, sly, surprisingly wise about ageing and identity, and quietly radical about what a fairy tale is allowed to do. A modern classic, and earned.