Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Novel
by Susanna Clarke
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Book Reviews of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Novel
Book Review: "Two Magicians Shall Appear in England..."
Summary: 5 Stars
"Jonathan Strange & Norrell" is a strange novel indeed, but arrestingly so, one of the qualities of a masterpiece. The book even looks strange, 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 Susanna 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 some 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."
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 Nature herself: 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."
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.
Book Review: a long journey
Summary: 4 Stars
Many books are to be read, some are to be studied, and a few are meant to be lived in for weeks. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is of this last kind...Magnificent and original."-- Washington Post
And that is what I did - lived in it for a few weeks. I am usually a fast reader, especially when it comes to fantasy, but this book was meant to be lived in for a time. It is not a typical modern fantasy novel, but is as literary as it is fantastical. It draws of the influence of the Romantics like Austen as much as it does classic fantasy writers like McDonald and Tolkien. It is a book full of side stories, minor characters, a fantastic magical literary history told through footnotes, and a plot that builds slowly but deliberately upon itself.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is an epic tale of the re-birth of magic in nineteenth-century England. Amidst familiar elements of setting (such as the Napoleonic wars) one is presented with a world where magic actually worked. Or did until the habit became to study about magic rather than to actually do magic. Two magicians - very different in character- who, as teacher and pupil and then as rivals, attempt to bring practical magic back to England. A rambling exploration of their attempts and the consequences thereof comprise the extent of the book.
The magic in play is not some disneyfied nursery appropriate version, but this is a fairy-tale that remembers that fairies are dangerous and magic holds its own perils. It is the divergent responses of the two magicians to the unveiling of the danger that most intrigued me. Norrell chose to hide it - to suppress any mention of Fairy so as to protect the common people by letting any recollection of Fairy just fade away. He essentially bans books, forcefully prevents the publication of information he disagrees with, lies about the power of Fairy, and ridicules those who believe in it. By controlling knowledge he hopes to protect the people from the danger - and retain all magical power for himself. Strange wants to embrace knowledge and crosses the lines of sanity in his quest to do so. He pays dearly for his knowledge, but still chooses to discover what he can so as to be equipped for his job. He wants magic to be in the hands of the people - accessible to all - allowing all people the power to protect themselves.
I kept having this book recommended to me as something that a person involved in religion would find interesting. The parallels between the debates in the world of magic and those of the church are interesting. Besides the amusing critique of those who merely talk about and study magic/religion and don't actually practice it, I found the whole idea of the control of knowledge relevant. People in power can often control ideas. Even with the advent of widespread communication, it is those with the most money and therefore audience who hold the power. What then becomes most important - truth or power? Will they twist the facts or lie in order to serve a greater good? In the church, will ideas and knowledge be suppressed if they get people asking the wrong sorts of questions? Is it more important to keep people ignorant within the safe confines of a particular doctrine than it is to earnestly seek truth? I've seen Norrell's power plays in the church as knowledge and the right to ask questions is suppressed. I find myself as more of a Strangeite who will pursue ideas no matter where they lead, no matter what it might cost. And I support that for all people. To blindly trust in a voice just because it has authority/power seems wrong because I don't know how I might be being manipulated. I want to be a truth seeker.
Many reviewers commented on the near absence of the church in this book. I found it refreshing to not have to read another book lamenting how the church persecuted magic, but I think the symbol or idea of the church existed in her structure of magic. The magic here seems to contain the debates, structures, and realms of religion, philosophy, and academia combined. It is an alternate world that speaks to the issues in our own. Its questions can be our questions if we care to scratch the surface of the story.
Book Review: A Delightful Doorstop of a Book
Summary: 5 Stars
Ah, what a delightful doorstop of a book. It's over 1,000 pages, and still I didn't want the story to end. And speaking of endings, Susanna Clarke pulls off a consummate ending to a story into which she threaded numerous strands. She wraps them up just right, in a way I didn't foresee but which, to my hindsight, is perfect.
But enough about the ending -- no spoilers in this review, I promise!
The story takes place in Regency England and revolves around two English magicians, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and their activities during and immediately following the Napoleonic Wars. At the beginning of the story, magic has become, in people's minds, a theoretical construct only, and a dusty group of theoretical magicians meet periodically in Northern England to discuss it. Perish the thought that anybody actually practice magic. That would be downright ungentlemanly.
But a new member of the society has other ideas, and pretty soon, he discovers that there remains one practicing magician in England: Mr. Norrell. Though Mr. Norrell practices magic instead of only talking about it, he's conservative in what kind of magic he'll practice -- nothing too wild or woolly -- and he jealously guards his knowledge until a talented upstart, Jonathan Strange, becomes his pupil. And even then, though he admires Strange's talent and enjoys Strange's friendship, Mr. Norrell continues to withhold significant areas of magical knowledge from him, telling himself Strange doesn't need to practice those kinds of magic, nor does anyone.
Mr. Norrell breaks with his conservatism once, however, and performs a type of fairy magic to raise from the dead the wife of Walter Pole, a prominent politician, to curry Pole's favor. Then the trouble starts: a malicious fairy, "the gentleman with the thistle-down hair" who is never named, places under enchantment not only Lady Pole but also Walter Pole's head servant, Stephen Black, and ultimately Jonathan Strange's wife, Arabella, as well.
And enchantment by the gentleman with the thistle-down hair, by the way, is not fun. It starts out somewhat that way for the adventurous spirit, but it becomes a sort of death-in-life for the enchanted. The more time spent in faerie the darker and more dismal and tedious grows the stay. The gentleman with the thistle-down hair is a fairy king but he's a neglectful one, and his brugh, which he disguises as a run-down castle, is surrounded by the bones of the people he has killed for sport over the ages.
Mr. Norrell's goal has been to "return magic to England", though paradoxically he wants to control most of the knowledge and practice himself, and he also wants to keep under wraps, as much as he can, the magic performed and inspired by John Uskglass, a powerful magician-King from centuries past whose knowledge has largely been lost. When the brave and resolute Strange discovers some of the Raven King's magic and begins performing it himself, Mr. Norrell strongly disapproves, creating a rift between England's only two practicing magicians.
Strange and Norrell hold it together long enough to help Wellington defeat Napoleon, but compared to the gentleman with the thistle-down hair, Napoleon was a piker. Can they put aside their differences to defeat the malicious fairy?
To say this book is magical would be gross understatement. It's an enthralling combination of mind-blowing fantasy and tongue-in-cheek fun-poking at the manners of the day. Delightful, dry humor is woven throughout, and its sheer imaginative power rivals the works of Tolkien.
Book Review: The Line Between the Mystical and the Physical
Summary: 5 Stars
There are few novels that can walk the line between the fantastic and the real, where the outstanding becomes inseparable from the common-place, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is one of these books. Susanna Clarke has succeeded in creating a 19th Century England full of magic and mystery, while still being anchored in the realities and histories of 19th Century Europe during the Napoleonic Wars. The novel can best be described as an alternative-history. In this world northern England was once ruled by a magician-king, referred to, among other names, as the Raven King. He is responsible for bringing magic to England, ruling for over 300 years before mysteriously disappearing.
The novel opens long after the departure of the Raven King, magicians are nothing more than glorified scholars, pouring over books about magic, unable themselves to preform any. Magic is gone from England and no one really understands how or why. The great acts of magic performed by the Raven King and the other great magicians has long been sequestered to books and fables. However, an old man appears and performs an extraordinary display of magic, sending all of England into an uproar.
The characters in the novel, on the surface appear rather stereotypical. Mr. Norrell is an old, scholarly magician bent on preserving tradition and pouring over his numerous tomes. His pupil, Jonathan Strange is young and brash, eager to push the boundaries of magic, to experiment rather than read about magical pursuits. However, as the novel wears on you discover each as a depth of character unlike their outward persona's. Each is driven by different fears and passions, and they both have much more in common than they realize.
The novel's greatest strength lies in how believable and tangible the world Mrs. Clarke portrays is brought to life. The novel is littered with footnotes outlining interesting facts and fables (some of which span multiple pages). These are never tedious and all serve to annunciate the "believability" of the story. In this fashion she reminds me of another great English author, J.R.R. Tolkien who went through great pains to add color and depth to his world, expanding upon small details, evening creating a language of his own. Mrs. Clarke also has a keen sense of mixing humor with drama, adding the right touch of levity at appropriate times. Her humor is very much like that of Jane Austen, poking fun at the social dilemmas gentleman and ladies found themselves in during the 19th century, where morality and social acceptability ran counter to emotions.
The novel is broken into three volumes, each segmented into many chapters, with few running more than twenty pages. This does a good job of making the 846 page novel easily digestible. This is Susanna Clarke's first novel and pacing is one issue she has yet to master. The novel lags during a few places (notably during the beginning and end of volume I), and the ending seems to flow in a torrent. However, it is very easy to get lost in the prose, which is succinct and well constructed. Her descriptions of magical acts are particularly well written, with metaphors that precisely illustrate the events at hand in perfect detail.
In the end this is a tremendous novel, one of the best constructed literary worlds I've had the pleasure of exploring.
Book Review: A lengthy read, wry text, and truly unusual, unique book. Not perfect, not for everyone, but highly recommended
Summary: 4 Stars
In 1806, while England is under attack by Napoleon and English magic has been dead for centuries, theoretical magical scholars discover a single practical magician: Mr. Norrell, whose debut makes statues sing and disbands the society of theoretical magicians. Soon, a second practical magician introduces himself to Norrell: his name is Jonathan Strange. Strange studies under Norrell, and together they begin to restore magic to England. However, the two men disagree on all points--none more so than the role of John Uskglass, the Raven King, the last and perhaps most influential magician in England. Their magical growth, partnership, struggles, and competing views on the Raven King make up this book which defies genres: part fantasy, part noir, part history text (complete with footnotes), part satire, Clarke has an incredibly unique writing style and creates a book that is lengthy, filled with magic and antiheros, and exists entirely and unapologetically within its own reality. Strange & Norrell is a lengthy, slow read, but undeniably well plotted and written. If for no other reason, I recommend it for being one of the most unique books I have ever read.
The greatest drawback to this book is its size. Admittedly, it is only 800 pages, which is long but not unreasonable. However, the printed book is gigantic, especially the hardcover edition. The mass of this text makes it seem all the longer, as does the unusual writing style, which is meandering and has footnotes that can sometimes take up pages in and of themselves. All of these factors make up a book which is a long, slow read. I never became enraptured, and until the last 100 pages never felt anxious to sit down and read large chunks of text in one sitting. I'm a fast reader, but this book still took me two weeks.
However, as a part of the writing style, this lengthy, slow storytelling appears to be intentional and is part of the book's overall style. As for the style: I've never read anything like it. The characters are almost universally antiheros, the writing is dry and regards the characters and events with a removed, wry eye, and the book includes footnotes that explain, in the tradition of academic writing, details and stories that are mentioned in passing in the text. All of this makes absolutely no reference to our world--that is, our own history. The style is distinctive, unapologetic, and both darkly humorous and, on some levels, meaningful and realistic.
The plot meanders from war to learning to old magic, the book reads slowly, the characters are as painfully irritating as they are lovable, and there has never been a book like this. Illustrated in black and white, the book also reads like it is in black and white: stylized, unique, intentional, and at the same time irreverently meaningful. The style is the highlight and creative force of the text. I don't know if this is a book for all readers, but I do recommend it. Pick it up, read the first chapter, and see if Clarke's unusual world and unique style appeals to you. If it does, you will enjoy this book.