by Susanna Clarke
appreciated by John Murphy
“Two magicians shall appear in England…”
I tend to catch the tail-end of trends, like an overeager gate-crasher at a party long since broken up. When friends and family suggest—nay, insist—that I must, I absolutely must watch such-and-such a movie, listen to such-and-such a single, or read such-and-such a book (often pressing the precious thing into my hands) … such recommendations tend to gather dust on my desk, languishing as improvised coasters.
Passionate readers are a persistent bunch, however, and I’ve been known myself to press a book or movie or into an obliging hand. And few books have inspired such cultish, committed passion as a bestselling fantasy novel featuring English magicians by a British female author.
‘But I say,’ he says. ‘Harry Potter is a cracking wheeze but came up a bit short in the final stretch, what?’
‘No, you silly ass,’ comes the rejoinder, “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.”
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Susanna Clarke made a smashing debut in 2004. Strange & Norell spent long tenures on bestseller lists, met with near-universal critical acclaim, garnered numerous awards, and had its movie rights snatched up by New Line, the company behind The Lord of the Rings series. But a curious thing has happened seven years on: the movie hasn’t been made, the sequel has not been forthcoming and a whole lot of those copies of Strange & Norrell have become doorstoppers, I’m guessing, if not coasters.
Harry Potter, it would seem, is hardly a fit comparison. For Strange & Norrell is a strange novel indeed. The Potter series is breathless, page-turning storytelling packed with likable heroes and snarling villains—surefire ingredients of the mega-hit bestseller. Clarke prefers atmosphere to heartstopping set-pieces, slow build-ups to cliffhanger suspense, ambiguity to resolution, close-up characterization to wide-angle characters, and dry wit to belly laughs. Her novel is as much a comedy of manners as it is a fantasy. The book even looks strange (catnip to a bibliophile), with its lengthy footnotes, quaint typesetting, and antiquated spellings (‘stopt’ instead of ‘stopped,’ or ‘chuses’ instead of ‘chooses’) all meant to evoke the bygone era Clarke is writing about: early 19th century England.
Strange & Norrell re-imagines English history as the history of English magic. (Harry Potter by way of Jane Austen gives you an idea). The events of the novel begin sometime around 1806, a time when English magic had been relegated to dull history books and practiced only by “theoretical magicians,” members of gentlemen’s clubs who are really just dry and dusty academics. No one actually does magic anymore.
Enter Gilbert Norrell, a small, elderly gentleman with a nervous disposition who claims that “I myself am quite a tolerable practical magician.” Norrell’s attempt to revive English magic involves establishing himself as its foremost practitioner, and eliminating all potential rivals to the title of “Greatest Magician of the Age.” He is the Enlightenment’s poster-boy, all reason and dessicated rules.
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Enter Jonathan Strange: a young man of independent means who almost literally stumbles upon magic as his vocation. He is Norrell’s opposite: impulsive, courageous, sociable, and anxious to try new things. Strange comes to discover that magic can be learned not just from books, but from living, breathing Nature: the trees, the stones, the sky, the rivers (talk about ‘books in the babbling brooks’) just as Romantic artists, poets, and musicians were around the same time enamored of the idea that Nature is the fountain of inspiration.
Over the course of 800 pages, Clarke charts the growing enmity between Strange & Norrell, as well as detouring to several subplots, one of which includes a blood-chilling villain: a powerful faerie with the evocative descriptor of “The Man with the thistle-down hair.” Amusing cameos are also made by King George III, the Duke of Wellington, Lord Byron, and a whole host of English figures from the Napoleonic era. Strange’s encounters with Wellington in Spain and Byron in Venice are calculated to delight any and all Anglophiles.
Indeed, the novel entire is a love song to England—or perhaps a melancholy ballad. This is not William Blake’s “green & pleasant lands,” an idyll of the rolling hills, verdant countryside, and quaint cottage manners (though these welcome features do appear from time-to-time). In an encounter between Strange and the wicked faerie, for example, “the wood no longer struck Strange as a welcoming place. It appeared to him now as it had at first—sinister, unknowable, unEnglish.”
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Clarke’s book has a brooding, wintry atmosphere (every few scenes transport the reader to a desolate moor, blasted heath, or dark forest) appropriate to its treatment of magic as a not wholly holy business. Strange tosses off a comment to the Man with the thistle-down hair about how he can’t perform spells with certain objects present, including a consecrated host. Such an aside will likely alarm the judicious reader more than it apparently does the absent-minded Strange. For all the brouhaha about Harry Potter being anti-Christian, Rowling situates her story in a specifically Christian moral universe: good and evil are clearly defined and she valorizes friendship, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. Clarke’s ethos is more ambiguous—the lines between good and evil are blurred, and magic seems more and more a means of accessing power humankind was never morally equipped to possess.
illustrated by John Murphy, available from Amazon
Hamlet’s line, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy,” could have serve as an appropriate epigraph to this story. The unpredictability of Susanna Clarke’s world—the eerie sense that a mirror could become a door or a dark forest suddenly spring up in the middle of a city street—owes something to G.K. Chesterton’s wild-and-woolly The Man Who Was Thursday, a book Clarke has cited as an influence. As the story progresses, one begins to feel like a disoriented visitor to the “kingdom behind the mirror” that Strange describes: “I wish I could give you an idea of its grandeur! Of its size and complexity! Of the great stone halls that lead off in every direction … I saw staircases that rose up so high I could not see the top of them, and others that descended into utter blackness.”
Though Clarke’s pacing is deliberate, she holds the reader’s attention with her meticulous craftsmanship, characteristically British wit, and the generosity of her visionary imagination. A single one of her footnotes contains more humor, style, and creativity than most fiction released nowadays. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a sumptuous medieval tapestry of a story—a tapestry that doubles as a magic carpet—gilded with lavish detail, colorful characters, exotic places, and finely-wrought decorative flourishes. “Author as magician” clichés are as applicable to the prodigiously talented Ms Clarke as they are to her sister sorceress, JK Rowling. Prepare to be enchanted.
Note: My introduction to Clarke’s wonderful book arrived by way of Simon Prebble’s virtuoso audiobook rendition. His gravelly, mellifluous voice was the soundtrack to many long walks I took over the course of a gray, rainy winter. It was a rare and unexpected treat to feel the world fall away as his masterful narration transported me to the faraway lands of Clarke’s fertile imagination.
I’m on my umpteenth “listening” of this (audio)book, and feel quite safe, I think, in predicting that Neil Gaiman was quite correct in identifying this book as the most important work of fantasy to be published in many decades, for my money since Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. In fact, I think Clarke may be pulling off (once we read the rest in the series) precisely what Tolkien set out to do: to create a mythology for England; especially since Tolkien, in fact, created a mythology for the West.
I hesitate to speculate, too, but there is a certain sense in which this book might be read almost as an allegory for that “true” Romanticism which longed for a return to the medieval ages/the Age of Faith, and yet was not afraid to recognize that this involved an embracing of a certain danger that ensues whenever one messes with “more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophies.” Of course, the fact is probably that those dangers, as Mr. Norrell learns, cannot be avoided anyway, no matter how much we seek to Bowdlerize and contain them. Magic will out.
I also took the liberty of adding this book to the “Drop the Needle” list. I have on several occasions stopped to revisit a particularly wonderful scene, then found myself unable to quit reading until I have once more finished the book.