Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
Though I started reading this novel very soon after it came out, I appear to be the last person in Christendom to finish it. My copy is a huge, massively heavy hardcover, meaning that it never really left the house; bad for page-progress, since I do most of my reading in trains and on airplanes. (The novel has since been released in paperback, but even the paperback is pretty hefty.)
So I doubt anything I have to say about Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell will be news to you, since it has become something of a sensation in the last couple of years and has turned up, justifiably, on many, many must-read lists. Nevertheless, on the off-chance that you haven't yet heard of it: for the love of God, read this book. It is clever and funny and musical and rich and utterly, utterly charming.
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is the sprawling story of two magicians in Mad King George's England. The narrator speaks in a stiff, old-fashioned dialect.
Houses, like people, are apt to become rather eccentric if left too much on their own; this house was the architectural equivalent of an old gentleman in a worn dressing-gown and torn slippers, who got up and went to bed at odd times of day, and who kept up a continual conversation with friends no one else could see. As Mr Segundus wandered about in search of whoever was in charge, he found a room which contained nothing but china cheese-moulds, all stacked one upon another. Another room had heaps of queer red clothes, the like of which he had never seen before -- something between labourers' smocks and clergymen's robes. The kitchen had very few of those articles that usually belong to kitchens, but it did have the skull of an alligator in a glass case; the skull had a great grin and seemed very pleased with itself, though Mr Segundus did not know why it should be.
The dusty world of nineteenth-century England creates the initial setting for the book: the bickering of lords, the meetings of polite but ineffectual scholars in their bland secret societies, the ravings of pseudo-prophets in alleyways, tedious conversations in sitting-rooms and arguments in broadsheets, all laid against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars.
But our two protagonists yearn to recreate the days of the Raven King, a possibly-mythical magician from the Middle Ages who (the stories say) could do just about anything, and whose students wrote reams of nearly incomprehensible notes and made bizarre magical scars on the English landscape before dying out entirely. Gifted magicians both, but with very different personalities and talents, Messrs. Strange and Norrell spend the bulk of the novel bringing magic back to England.
The charms of this book are many, and I will only list a few. The characters, for one thing, are expertly drawn. Norrell is a sour, selfish, unfriendly little man, who always manages to say the wrong thing and alienate everyone, including the reader. We meet him first, and spend many pages in his unpleasant yet hilarious company; it is quite some time before Strange even appears on the scene. When we finally do meet him, we learn that, unlike Norrell, he is charismatic, friendly, generous, and inexperienced. However, like Norrell, he is arrogant and driven. Needless to say, tensions immediately flare up between the two men, and create much of the fuel for the book's numerous, twisting subplots. The minor characters, too, are striking in their variety. Even their names sound faintly magical in an aristocratic, English sort of way: Drawlight, Honeyfoot, Portishead (!), Erquistoune, Greysteel, Childermass, Godbless.
One of the bones of contention between the two magicians is the use of faerie-magic; Strange is curious about it, while Norrell considers it too dangerous and unpredictable to be worth exploring. However, since Norrell is in possession of the only magical library in the country, and since he carefully guards it even (or perhaps especially) from his only pupil, Strange must find other outlets for his curiosity.
The occasional incursions of faerie into this mostly-ordinary England is one of the other great strengths of the book. I have never seen a work of fiction with as keen an awareness of authentic faerie-lore as this one -- and I don't think I've seen many nonfiction ones that rival it, either. A far cry from the pointy-eared, superpowered elves of fantasy novels and role-playing games, the sidhe of Clarke's novel are dangerously self-absorbed and fickle creatures with motivations that simply cannot be understood by those of us who live above the mounds. The main faerie character, who is never named, is deliciously alien. He is not an evil character, or even an especially unfriendly one (not like Norrell is, anyway); he simply pursues his own agendas without any real understanding of what humans want or need. You like dancing? Well, let's dance all night, then, every night! Clarke puts the frightfulness back into the old stories, while maintaining a very English sense of humour about them.
"Now, my dear Stephen," said the gentleman. "The question before us is: how may we fetch the lady away without any one noticing -- particularly the magicians!" He considered a moment. "I have it! Fetch me a piece of moss-oak!"
"Sir?"
"It must be about your own girth and as tall as my collar bone."
"I would gladly fetch it for you immediately, sir. But I do not know what moss-oak is."
"Ancient wood that has been sunk in peat bogs for countless centuries!"
"Then, sir, I fear we are not very likely to find any in London. There are no peat bogs here."
"True, true." The gentleman flung himself back in his chair and stared at the ceiling while he considered this tricky problem.
"Would any other sort of wood suit your purposes, sir?" asked Stephen. "There is a timber merchant in Gracechurch-street, who I dare say..."
"No, no," said the gentleman. "This must be done..."
At that instant Stephen experienced the queerest sensation: he was plucked out of his chair and stood upon his feet. At the same moment the coffee-house disappeared and was replaced by a pitch-black, ice-cold nothingness. A bitter wind howled about his ears and a thick rain seemed to be falling upon him from all directions at once.
"... properly," continued the gentleman in exactly the same tone as before.
Oddly, the things I liked least about the novel are the ones that are most often mentioned as its strong points. A lot of reviewers have mentioned the fact that JS&MN contains footnotes as evidence of its cleverness. Frankly, I found the footnotes dull at best and distracting at worst; they felt to me like worldbuilding notes that Clarke couldn't bring herself to throw away and which she felt the overwhelming need to show everyone. (In the Turkey City lexicon, that's called "I Have Suffered For My Art.") Academic writing, especially nineteenth-century academic writing, has a pompous and distinctive style that cries out for parody, and a footnoted novel along the lines of what Jorge Luis Borges is famous for could have been funny here. But I don't think Clarke got the tone right, so what we're left with are infodumps in tiny print.
In a novel filled with nineteenth-century cadences but mostly modern spellings, Clarke's decision to render some words in an obsolete orthography was pretty jarring: surprize, chuse, stopt, shew. I wish she had trusted her prose, which was perfectly capable of creating atmosphere, without artificially inserting very occasional Victorian spellings into things.
I thought Clarke lost control of a few of her plots -- a lengthy digression that took Strange to Spain did nothing for me, and I wasn't that impressed with the long scenes set in Venice either. (That said, she kept careful track of her characters, having them disappear and reappear in surprising [or should I say surprizing] ways.)
And finally, I hated, just hated, the illustrations, which were amateurish and ugly, and which managed to bleed almost all the magic out of Clarke's vivid descriptions. I did like the idea of illustrating the novel in principle -- so many novels of the time period were illustrated, after all -- but I wish the publishers had found an artist with the same eye for detail (and irony) as Clarke has as a writer. Instead we got smudged charcoal depictions of tiny, crooked figures standing in empty rooms.
Illustrations, footnotes, a surfeit of subplots, occasional creative spellings: these are all relatively easy things to overlook. For all its flaws, I think that this book deserves the hype it's received, and it's well worth reading if you're up to lugging it around. And this is Clarke's first novel! I can't wait to see what she will be capable of once she's matured a little more as a writer.
So I doubt anything I have to say about Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell will be news to you, since it has become something of a sensation in the last couple of years and has turned up, justifiably, on many, many must-read lists. Nevertheless, on the off-chance that you haven't yet heard of it: for the love of God, read this book. It is clever and funny and musical and rich and utterly, utterly charming.
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is the sprawling story of two magicians in Mad King George's England. The narrator speaks in a stiff, old-fashioned dialect.
Houses, like people, are apt to become rather eccentric if left too much on their own; this house was the architectural equivalent of an old gentleman in a worn dressing-gown and torn slippers, who got up and went to bed at odd times of day, and who kept up a continual conversation with friends no one else could see. As Mr Segundus wandered about in search of whoever was in charge, he found a room which contained nothing but china cheese-moulds, all stacked one upon another. Another room had heaps of queer red clothes, the like of which he had never seen before -- something between labourers' smocks and clergymen's robes. The kitchen had very few of those articles that usually belong to kitchens, but it did have the skull of an alligator in a glass case; the skull had a great grin and seemed very pleased with itself, though Mr Segundus did not know why it should be.
The dusty world of nineteenth-century England creates the initial setting for the book: the bickering of lords, the meetings of polite but ineffectual scholars in their bland secret societies, the ravings of pseudo-prophets in alleyways, tedious conversations in sitting-rooms and arguments in broadsheets, all laid against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars.
But our two protagonists yearn to recreate the days of the Raven King, a possibly-mythical magician from the Middle Ages who (the stories say) could do just about anything, and whose students wrote reams of nearly incomprehensible notes and made bizarre magical scars on the English landscape before dying out entirely. Gifted magicians both, but with very different personalities and talents, Messrs. Strange and Norrell spend the bulk of the novel bringing magic back to England.
The charms of this book are many, and I will only list a few. The characters, for one thing, are expertly drawn. Norrell is a sour, selfish, unfriendly little man, who always manages to say the wrong thing and alienate everyone, including the reader. We meet him first, and spend many pages in his unpleasant yet hilarious company; it is quite some time before Strange even appears on the scene. When we finally do meet him, we learn that, unlike Norrell, he is charismatic, friendly, generous, and inexperienced. However, like Norrell, he is arrogant and driven. Needless to say, tensions immediately flare up between the two men, and create much of the fuel for the book's numerous, twisting subplots. The minor characters, too, are striking in their variety. Even their names sound faintly magical in an aristocratic, English sort of way: Drawlight, Honeyfoot, Portishead (!), Erquistoune, Greysteel, Childermass, Godbless.
One of the bones of contention between the two magicians is the use of faerie-magic; Strange is curious about it, while Norrell considers it too dangerous and unpredictable to be worth exploring. However, since Norrell is in possession of the only magical library in the country, and since he carefully guards it even (or perhaps especially) from his only pupil, Strange must find other outlets for his curiosity.
The occasional incursions of faerie into this mostly-ordinary England is one of the other great strengths of the book. I have never seen a work of fiction with as keen an awareness of authentic faerie-lore as this one -- and I don't think I've seen many nonfiction ones that rival it, either. A far cry from the pointy-eared, superpowered elves of fantasy novels and role-playing games, the sidhe of Clarke's novel are dangerously self-absorbed and fickle creatures with motivations that simply cannot be understood by those of us who live above the mounds. The main faerie character, who is never named, is deliciously alien. He is not an evil character, or even an especially unfriendly one (not like Norrell is, anyway); he simply pursues his own agendas without any real understanding of what humans want or need. You like dancing? Well, let's dance all night, then, every night! Clarke puts the frightfulness back into the old stories, while maintaining a very English sense of humour about them.
"Now, my dear Stephen," said the gentleman. "The question before us is: how may we fetch the lady away without any one noticing -- particularly the magicians!" He considered a moment. "I have it! Fetch me a piece of moss-oak!"
"Sir?"
"It must be about your own girth and as tall as my collar bone."
"I would gladly fetch it for you immediately, sir. But I do not know what moss-oak is."
"Ancient wood that has been sunk in peat bogs for countless centuries!"
"Then, sir, I fear we are not very likely to find any in London. There are no peat bogs here."
"True, true." The gentleman flung himself back in his chair and stared at the ceiling while he considered this tricky problem.
"Would any other sort of wood suit your purposes, sir?" asked Stephen. "There is a timber merchant in Gracechurch-street, who I dare say..."
"No, no," said the gentleman. "This must be done..."
At that instant Stephen experienced the queerest sensation: he was plucked out of his chair and stood upon his feet. At the same moment the coffee-house disappeared and was replaced by a pitch-black, ice-cold nothingness. A bitter wind howled about his ears and a thick rain seemed to be falling upon him from all directions at once.
"... properly," continued the gentleman in exactly the same tone as before.
Oddly, the things I liked least about the novel are the ones that are most often mentioned as its strong points. A lot of reviewers have mentioned the fact that JS&MN contains footnotes as evidence of its cleverness. Frankly, I found the footnotes dull at best and distracting at worst; they felt to me like worldbuilding notes that Clarke couldn't bring herself to throw away and which she felt the overwhelming need to show everyone. (In the Turkey City lexicon, that's called "I Have Suffered For My Art.") Academic writing, especially nineteenth-century academic writing, has a pompous and distinctive style that cries out for parody, and a footnoted novel along the lines of what Jorge Luis Borges is famous for could have been funny here. But I don't think Clarke got the tone right, so what we're left with are infodumps in tiny print.
In a novel filled with nineteenth-century cadences but mostly modern spellings, Clarke's decision to render some words in an obsolete orthography was pretty jarring: surprize, chuse, stopt, shew. I wish she had trusted her prose, which was perfectly capable of creating atmosphere, without artificially inserting very occasional Victorian spellings into things.
I thought Clarke lost control of a few of her plots -- a lengthy digression that took Strange to Spain did nothing for me, and I wasn't that impressed with the long scenes set in Venice either. (That said, she kept careful track of her characters, having them disappear and reappear in surprising [or should I say surprizing] ways.)
And finally, I hated, just hated, the illustrations, which were amateurish and ugly, and which managed to bleed almost all the magic out of Clarke's vivid descriptions. I did like the idea of illustrating the novel in principle -- so many novels of the time period were illustrated, after all -- but I wish the publishers had found an artist with the same eye for detail (and irony) as Clarke has as a writer. Instead we got smudged charcoal depictions of tiny, crooked figures standing in empty rooms.
Illustrations, footnotes, a surfeit of subplots, occasional creative spellings: these are all relatively easy things to overlook. For all its flaws, I think that this book deserves the hype it's received, and it's well worth reading if you're up to lugging it around. And this is Clarke's first novel! I can't wait to see what she will be capable of once she's matured a little more as a writer.