“Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange. Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never would.”
The first thing to be said about Susanna Clarke’s novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is that the expectations of its readers will most likely all turn out to be wrong. Some will read the Neil Gaiman quote on the back – “…the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years” – and expect a Gaimanesque mythical landscape of gods and monsters; they won’t get it. Some will make a connection with those other books about magic written by a female British author, and expect a world infused with magic and fantasy; they too will be wrong. Still others will look at the hefty 800+ page count and assume a sprawling alt-history epic. Sadly, they will all be disappointed.
What they will find is something far more original and fascinating. Ms. Clarke has created a novel that feels completely like a product of the time and place in which it is set. The writing style is genteel and Dickensian, the pace stately, and the characters proper gentlemen at all times (well, most of them). You will find no jarringly anachronistic dialogue here. In fact, the illusion is taken to such a length that many words are rendered in 19th century spellings, and there is even a note on the history of the typeface. Overall, the book is infused with an all-pervading sense of – for want of a better word – ‘Englishness’.
The plot of the book is somewhat rambling, taking its time to get moving and never really settling into anything comfortably generic or familiar. The book opens in 1806, and introduces us to the Learned Society of York Magicians, a bunch of old men who practice only ‘theoretical’ magic. They unwittingly raise the ire of Mr Gilbert Norrell, the last real magician in England, who is in the habit of destroying anyone he perceives as magical competition. Norrell’s magic is one of books, history and accumulated knowledge; in fact, the chief reason for his being the only practical magician in England is that he long ago bought out all surviving magical texts. After dealing with the York society, he decides to move to London and offer his services to the Crown in the war against Napoleon, thereby restoring English magic to its former glory (with himself as its leader and arbiter, of course).
Jonathan Strange represents the flipside of the coin. He falls into magic quite by accident: after being read a strange prophecy about how he is one of two magicians who will restore English magic, he discovers that he has innate talent for working magic, even without books. Norrell is an old, lonely, paranoid bachelor; Strange a young, hot-headed, sociable man, and recently wed. Nevertheless, as the only two magicians left in England they share an understanding, and Norrell takes Strange on as a pupil. But there will always be a divide between them in the form of John Uskglass, the human child raised by faeries, the legendary Raven King of the North, and greatest magician in English history. While Norrell fears and despises the Raven King, Strange is obsessed with him; it is this divide that forms the core of all the book’s plot events.
‘Where does the wind come from that blows upon your face, that fans the pages of your book? Where the harum-scarum magic of small wild creatures meets the magic of Man, where the language of the wind and the rain and the trees can be understood, there we will find the Raven King…’
The creation of an alternate history for England, the history of the Raven King, is one of Clarke’s greatest achievements in this book. The history of English magic is revealed to us slowly and carefully, so that at the beginning of the book we recognise an England not unlike our real one, but by its end we find that we have been living in an England of fantasy all along. Clarke’s history is so meticulously researched and bears such a ring of truth that the reader must remind themselves which events are true and which fiction. In particular, the chapters devoted to Strange’s battlefield magic against the French in Spain and at Waterloo are wonderfully evocative and transporting. Clarke even includes several historical ‘cameos’ that will leave history buffs delighted, especially King George, the Duke of Wellington and Lord Byron (particularly hilarious is Strange’s fictional visit to Byron and the Shelleys during their famous summer at Lake Geneva).
Another high point of the book, worth the price of admission on its own, is Clarke’s splendid use of footnotes. These can sometimes run for multiple pages, as the author gets carried away in some wonderful side story. Whenever a character rattles off a list of spell names, each and every one is accorded its own explanatory footnote; likewise, whenever a character mentions a folktale or historical account, we get to read it in full. Because of this, one gets the feeling that Clarke truly understands her world, as if she had built it from the ground up. Given that the novel, her first, reportedly took her 10 years to write, it would not be at all surprising if this were the case.
The only downside to all this detail is the rather irregular pace and structure, e.g. the fact that we don’t even meet Jonathan Strange until 200 pages into the book. Some readers may find this off-putting, but the fact is that this is not a rollicking, adventurous yarn; rather, it is a book to savour and to get lost in.
“Two magicians shall appear in England,” he said. “The first shall fear me; the second shall long to behold me; The first shall be governed by thieves and murderers; the second shall conspire at his own destruction; The first shall bury his heart in a dark wood beneath the snow, yet still feel its ache; The second shall see his dearest possession in his enemy’s hand…”
“I see,” interrupted Strange. “And which am I, the first or the second? No, do not tell me. It does not matter. Both sound entirely dreadful.”
Clarke is refreshingly idiosyncratic in her characterisation of the two titular characters. Norrell is hardly heroic, or even particularly likable – it is his hubris that attracts the enmity of a powerful faerie king, which causes much tragedy and suffering further down the line – and yet the reader still empathises with him. Strange, the real hero of the book, neglects his wife, makes terrible decisions, and has little time for anyone of lower station than him. Both characters are also slow to reveal their true colours to the reader, and much of the joy of the book is in wondering what each will do next. The outcome of the final, inevitable confrontation between the last two English magicians is a pleasantly surprising twist, but is completely logical considering what has gone before.
The book’s side characters are an entertaining bunch. Foremost among them is the faerie king of the castle Lost-Hope, a.k.a. ‘the gentleman with the thistle-down hair’, an implacable and terrifying foe of English magicians. Clarke’s represents the fae and Faerie itself as mercurial, amoral and inhuman; an idea much more in keeping with English tradition and folklore than the watered-down fae of most modern fiction. Stephen Black, the African servant who becomes the unwilling favourite of the fae king, is written with skill and humour; without ever descending to preaching, Clarke uses him to remind us of the injustices of class and race that are part and parcel of English history. The only secondary characters that feel slightly less than fleshed-out are the enchanted Lady Pole and Strange’s wife Arabella.
Which brings me to some of the perceived problems with the book. Michael Dirda at the Washington Post proclaimed it ‘a very masculine book, with no particular interest in the female characters, who all seem typecast…’ He also points out that sex plays little or no part in the story, with enchanted maidens trapped in Faerie ‘…forced to dance all night… but that’s about it.’ One could counter that this is merely an extension of the book’s attempt to place itself within its own setting; the proper English nature of the story naturally must emphasise the male characters and suppress ungentlemanly things. While searching for sexual subtext, one could also search for dramatic accounts of fireballs and dragon-slaying; all these searches would be in vain, as these things were simply not printed during the time period in which the book purports to exist. Nevertheless, the subtext is there if you look hard enough: the gentleman with the thistle-down hair comes across as a very sexual being, for example.
In terms of role-playing, Clarke’s mystical Britain abounds with possibilities for Victorian-era adventure. The studious bookworm Norrell and his disreputable retinue of servants and advisers seem like a fantastic Ars Magica troupe, scheming and hob-nobbing with the high society of London. Other ideas might include travelling across the countryside in search of the Raven King, using battlefield magic on campaign, or perhaps even attempting to restore the magic of some other European kingdom.
To conclude, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell may or may not be the ‘finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years’; personally, I haven’t read them all so I would be disinclined to judge. It is, however, the finest fantasy novel I have read in a long time, and Ms Clarke is certainly one of the brightest new talents to come of Britain. Here’s hoping her next novel is out in less than ten years.
If you enjoyed this review, feel free to check out the fiction and RPG material on my blog, The Last Light in Byzantium.
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