Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

By Susanna Clarke
Read: December 2009
Rating: Engrossing

For the record, I am including this in the 2009 50Book list, because I read the vast majority of it during December. So there.

Mein gott, this has been sitting on my shelf since FOREVER. And it is one daunting brick of a book, too. Over 1000 pages in the paperback. No wonder it took Clarke 10 years to write it!

I think it’s actually in the book’s favor that I let it sit until now. It’s written in the style of its period–early 1800s. Though much less dry than some of the books written at the time, it’s also much slower than what modern readers are used to. Add to that its slow start, and I may never have gotten past page 50.

It turns out you need to get past pages 100-150. That’s when it finally starts to get interesting.

Despite the title, we begin with Mr. Norrell (Strange shows up way later). Norrell is the first practical English magician in hundreds of years. There was a period when magic flourished, but the magician-king of that era moved on, and magic left England. The ‘magicians’ since have been theoretical scholars, concerned more with preserving spells than performing them. The book starts with a meeting of such men, who are both thrilled to discover a man with the best magical library in the land so very close to them, and then horrified when he forces them to give up their studies.

This is really all you need to know about Norrell’s personality. He is miserly with knowledge. He sees it as his treasured responsibility to return magic to England. But he also feels that, well, magic needs to be protected from magicians. He does not trust ‘lesser’ intellects to use or understand it. And so Mr. Norrell, while defying the historical tradition himself, has simultaneously gone about preventing others from doing the same. His demonstration of magic for the theoretical magicians does cause quite a stir, though, so he takes the opportunity to travel to London and begin interesting Cabinet Ministers in his work.

Mr. Norrell isn’t much of a celebrity, though. He’s an academic, and much more prone to making long-winded speeches about why he can’t do something than just performing little party tricks for his hosts and their guests. I sympathize with these people, as reading about Mr. Norrell being boring is not much better.

But then a young woman dies. And Norrell does something he swore he would not do–he attempts to bring her back to life. And for that, he must call upon another long-gone element in English magic… a faery.

We call this faery The Gentleman With the Thistledown Hair. He is not a good fellow. Not at ALL. And he wreaks havoc on the lives of many people during the course of the novel. Thankfully, his arrival signals a change in the pace, and from there the book is quite good.

In fact, come the last third, I was anxious to finish.

It’s a good book if you like old books and wish the cannon weren’t necessarily so restricted. Also good if you like fantasy but are sick of swords and sorcery or Harry Potter ripoffs. It’s hard to feel that you’ve ever hit the meat of the book, because everything is so dignified and formal, but there’s a different sort of satisfaction in it.

I suppose you could call it fantasy for literature snobs.

Lets see the Tolkeinites get through that.

It’s very sophisticated thematically. Like other similar books, it has a lot to do with Being British. It’s also a study of the long relationship between Norrell and Strange. Strange is far more charismatic and adventurous–their friendship was born at the same time as their rivalry. It has a lot to do with the dynamics of master/servant and teacher/student. There is a black man who is the butler for a cabinet minister, and he is aware of his special vulnerabilities in English society, without it becoming a same-old treatise on race.

Here are some nitpicky things that are still irritating me.

The book is very male-heavy–and I can’t really complain about that, because that’s what happened in the 1800s. You were a man or you GTFO. Add to this that distance of formality, and you can wind up with some very flat female characters who play very small roles. Thankfully Clarke manages to avoid that pitfall, but somehow, in the course of this massive book, she forget to tell us what happened.

There’s the woman who owns the grocery, and is in love with Stephen Black, the butler. She’s in love with him. The Gentleman With the Thistledown Hair even points this out and says they’ll get married on day. But she disappears from the narrative somewhere around the middle and we never hear of her again. That’s not a magical disappearance, it’s an author farking forgot about her disappearance.

Then you have Lady Pole, the woman whose life is endangered around page 100. She has become a very different person by the end of the book. And we know what she wants to do in the short term, she’s doing it, but then what? She’s suddenly a very interesting character, and one who has suffered a great deal. Give this poor woman the satisfaction of an ending, goddammit!

I’m not going to lump Arabella into this final criticism. She is part of a very bittersweet ending. One that could be carried through into an intriguing sequel. It’s supposed to be like that.

I just hope we don’t have to wait 10 years to find out.