Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Novel
by Susanna Clarke
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Book Reviews of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Novel
Book Review: The Indescribable Double Life of Lady Pole
Summary: 5 Stars
Picture an England during the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century, very much like the historical England, recognizable in many ways to readers familiar with the period, except that this England has a magical past, a distant connection to medieval English magic which has dissipated and diminished for hundreds of years but is now starting to come alive again. This is the setting of Susanna Clarke's wonderful book, which conjures up a familiar alternate England which becomes progressively more strange and fascinating as the story unfolds.
The seminal figure of English magic was The Raven King, a mysterious figure who emerged fully formed in the 12th century, a human child raised in Faerie, to become the ruler of the entire north of England for the next three centuries with his capital in Newcastle, and additional demesnes in Faerie and on the far side of Hell. The last of the golden age magicians, Dr. Martin Pale, was nearly contemporaneous, and upon his death the decline of English magic became manifest until our story opens in the early 1800s, when the self-taught bookworm Gilbert Norrell emerges in Yorkshire as England's first practical magician in nearly 300 years.
Like J.K. Rowling, to whom her work has been compared, Clarke is adept at plotting and characterization. Clarke has said that her favorite character is Childermass, Norrell's loyal and highly competent servant; my favorite characters are the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair (a powerful, volatile and amoral Otherlander) and Stephen Black, an admirable person who reminds me of a personal friend with a similar name. My favorite plot device is the hidden and indescribable double life of Lady Pole, which is as frightening as anything in Robert W. Chambers. Please believe that I have said nothing that will ruin the experience: you will enjoy this book. ***
Book Review: Incredible!
Summary: 5 Stars
If Dickens had ever written fantasy, he might have produced a work like this. Clarke's style owes a great deal to Dickens, including her way of giving little background stories on the various characters - Jonathan Strange's manservant Jeremy Johns, for example. She is happy to provide footnotes of reference to the reader, of the history of magic and the life of the mysterious John Uskglass, also known as the Raven King, a human abducted by fairies as a child who returned as an adult to rule the North of England for 300 years.
The names invoke Dickens as well; where Dickens gave us such names as Chuzzlewit, Pecksniff, Trotwood, Nickleby, and Headstone, Clarke delights with Greysteel, Sixsmith, Drawlight, Godbless, Childremass, and more.
Unlike all other modern writers I've read, Clarke doesn't put modern-day people into 19th-century settings. Her characters ARE of the 19th century, with customs and ways of thinking intact. Even the spellings are accurate - "chuse", "surprize", "any thing", and a few I didn't know, such as "headach". Her language is perfect; her characters don't have a trace of the modern era about them.
As with other readers, I didn't want to read this book too quickly, even though I was dying to know what came next. It's simply too good to rush through, and Clarke's language is so eloquent that it must be savored.
I can only assume that Clarke has read all of the works of Dickens; the truth about Vinculus echoes one of the themes in Dickens' novel "Barnaby Rudge". It's rather like viewing a familiar landscape, one seen many times before, through the eyes of another. Dickens, too, used Venice as a backdrop (in "Little Dorrit"); Clarke's London is the same as his.
This may well be the best modern novel I've ever read. More, please!
Book Review: Enchanting
Summary: 5 Stars
In a blurb on the back cover, Neil Gaiman calls "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell'' the "finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years.'' And I am certain he's right -- though I haven't read much of the genre. This book is hard to beat. The writing is a sheer delight. Ms. Clarke is having such a good time with her inventions and her characters that you practically have no choice but to enjoy yourself too. I particularly enjoyed her ruminations upon cats. And I loved many of the individual sentences, including this one: "The King said nothing, but he tapped his nose and looked very sly.'' Mr. Norrell is one of the best-drawn characters I've encountered in literature. He is a formidable scholar and magician who is vain, myopic, frightened, reprehensible, childlike and yet somehow sympathetic. Some real-life figures - Lord Byron, the Duke of Wellington, King George III - enliven the story as well. I had a funny sensation as I read along. Nearly every book or movie or TV show about magic that I can remember builds part of the plot around the idea that the hero must overcome everyone else's disbelief. For some reason, it was a relief to find a story in which the magic is simply accepted as fact. I must find a quibble, and here it is: I was a bit confused by the ending, and I lost track of one of the novel's villains; I'm still not sure what happened to him. At first I was a bit intimidated by the sheer physical size of the novel; it's a load to carry around in a backpack or briefcase. And I worried I might be put off by a somewhat old-fashioned writing style and a bunch of footnotes. I needn't have worried. The footnotes are charming, and Ms. Clarke's style is, well, enchanting. "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell'' is great fun - a deeply funny, satisfying novel.Book Review: Fantastic (literally), but could have been better
Summary: 4 Stars
I read this book about a month ago and have been meaning to get my thoughts out about it for a while. First of all, I really enjoyed reading it. It was great. Great characters, interesting setting, creative and original dialogue and the layout of the book (with footnotes containing many tidbits of information that contributed to the backstory) was innovative and engrossing. The book just overall had a good "feel" to it, and some nights I put the book down truly feeling "ah well, back to reality".
I couldn't give it five stars though because it did feel that there was something lacking from it. And I think that "something" was, funnily enough, plot. The characters are brilliant, the setting, the description, the ideas, but the actual STORY seemed to lack something. I had trouble putting my finger on what it was. Some books just grab you and drag you along for the whole ride without letting go. I think of books like Stephen King's Desperation, Yann Martel's Life of Pi, Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby, the settings and characters in these books are all stellar, but it's the story that keeps you up nights. That central compelling story was the element that was somewhat lacking in Strange and Norrell.
It's as though the author (Susanna Martin) had twenty boxes of really cool ornaments, but a somewhat scraggly, undernourished christmas tree to hang them off.
Nevertheless, I'd heartily recommend the book to anyone who wants a big juicy novel to lose themselves in at days end, and particularly those who enjoy science fiction/fantasy novels. If there is a sequal (no spoilers, but hard to imagine), I think this element would be improved upon and would make this book otherwise an instant classic.
Book Review: Borrowing from many, imitating none.
Summary: 5 Stars
Susanna Clarke's "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell" is a delightful Frankenstein's Monster of a book, stitching together parts and themes from many authors to make something utterly sui generis. If I'm still not sure how one or two of the minor parts fit in with the whole, the book still functions very well as an engrossing, often dazzling entertainment. Just as J.K. Rowling hit the jackpot by imagining a school for young wizards, so Clarke devised a winning formula by imagining early nineteenth-century England as a country literally haunted by its medieval magical past, seeking to recover its wizardly power to outfox that devil "Buonaparte." The two men who answer their nation's call could not be more different: crabbed, secretive Gilbert Norrell, who fears the prospect of magic falling into untutored or unscrupulous hands, and bold, impetuous Jonathan Strange, who seeks Byronic glory in the recovery of English magic. (Byron, in fact, makes several appearances in the book, as does the Duke of Wellington.) The book could be described as an amalgam of Mary Shelley and Jane Austen (with the delicious shocks and surprises of the one, and the perceptive drawing-room comedy and fully fleshed characters of the other), with a good measure of Tolkienesque fantasy thrown in. Clarke wittily writes in an Austenian pastiche, even to the point of using authentic spellings of the period (i.e. "chuse" for "choose," "connexion" for "connection"), which makes her matter-of-fact descriptions of supernatural horrors all the more effective. The book sprawls over nearly 800 pages, and it may be, as with "Piers Plowman," that no one will ever wish it longer. But anyone susceptible to fantasy and magic will find this an excellent read.