Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

[coalescent]

Day 1 (pp1-15): First Impressions

It's a big book, but beautiful with it. Clean typesetting, good binding (incorporating a ribbon bookmark), and I like my edition's blackened page-edges.

I've stopped at the end of chapter one only because there's such a lot to assimilate. It never feels like heavy going, but a lot of information is conveyed in those first fifteen pages, and I want to have a clear picture in my head before I go further. Not all of it comes from the narrative, either--there are illustrations, and also a sprinkling of footnotes to fictional scholarly works. Clarke seems to write with the sort of formal, precise language that I, accurately or not, mentally associate with 19th-century Literature. This matches neatly with her treatment of magic as a dry, dead thing, its time passed, its study only dusty scholarship, never practice.

Or at least, that's how things stand when the reader encounters the York magicians for the first time. Things change. The arrival of one Mr Segundus sparks a debate about that fundamental question--why is there no more magic done in England? Together with a Mr Honeyfoot, Segundus visits the reclusive Mr Norrell, who they think may be able to shed some light on the matter. A small, seemingly somewhat cynical man, Norrell closes the first chapter by declaring that he is 'a tolerable practical magician'.

All in all, it's almost absurdly confident, absorbing writing--Clarke seems to do a better job of world creation in these 15 pages than most writers do in whole books.

Day 2 (pp16-206): Mr Norrell

So far, Mr Norrell has demonstrated his powers to the Yorkshire magicians and then decamped to London, there to encourage the Return of English Magic. He's fallen in with socialites and politicians and generals; and performed several acts of magic that, though moderately to very astounding when you actually think of them--making an illusory fleet of warships from rain; raising a girl from the dead--are presented in a very matter-of-fact manner. This is magic as Norrell intends it: useful, but not spectacle. Very orderly. Very (he thinks) English.

I find myself warming to Mr Norrell. For all his mean spirits and jealous hoarding of magic, he does genuinely want to help his country. It feels odd to see that sort of patriotism portrayed even semi-sympathetically.

Of the other characters, I'm convinced that there must be more to Norrell's assistant Childermass than meets the eye--if Norrell hadn't been so disparaging of fairies, I would have pegged Childermass as a fairy assistant. I also think too much is made of Vinculus, the street magician, for him to be merely the charlatan the characters assume him to be (though I hope he is not himself the Raven King, since that would be a bit too obvious).

I'm still enjoying it. I love Clarke's voice, lively and full of wit and elegance. I love the way that each and every character is introduced with a larger-than-life excess of detail (if nothing else, it's great for misdirection, since it makes it hard to tell who's in for the duration, who might pop up again later on, and who's just a five-page wonder).

However, I found the second hundred pages--in which the story meanders all over the place, leaving Norrell entirely at times and only starting to touch on Strange (who I instantly dislike, for reasons I haven't yet nailed down)--pretty hard going.

Then I realised something: the magic, English Magic, is the protagonist of this story. Even Strange and Norrell are just sideshows. And so we see the impact of the return of English Magic on society. We see how the ripples spread out from Mr Norrell's actions, in ways he doesn't (but posssibly should have) anticipated.

Day 3 (pp207-493): Jonathan Strange

Into the meat of the novel now. Strange and Norrell have met, and though their natures are very different Strange has agreed to be the pupil of Norrell. The initial suggestion is to think badly of Norrell for this, think that he wants to control his only rival, and in fact that does seem to be part of his motivation; but he surprises both himself and the reader by being enthusiastic about the new partnership. It's not so surprising once you think about it, though--Norrell's position has been a terribly lonely one, and now he has someone to talk to. It's just a shame (from his point of view) that Strange holds such contrary views.

The footnotes continue apace, anecdotes that deepen the book's sense of history. One takes up the better part of four pages, and is a short story unto itself. It's been excerpted online here.

Strange and Norrell--but particularly Strange--are starting to take their place on the stage of history. Strange rides to war with the Duke of Wellington, first in the Peninsular Wars, then later at the engagements up to and including Waterloo. Again I curse my lack of historical knowledge; I can say that Strange appears useful, but as far as I can tell he doesn't substantially alter the outcomes. The English are still victorious at Waterloo, and it seems not by any particularly larger margin than they really were.

More importantly, the central debate of the novel--which has eventually led to a split between Strange and Norrell--is becoming clear: what should be the nature of English Magic? There is a contrast between Norrell's view of an orderly, scholerly, proper magic and the wild, chaotic, outlandish magic of faery. I'm starting to think both magicians are at least to some extent misguided. Norrell is a control freak, certainly but Strange is capricious and arrogant and given to whims (I don't have a clear sense of why he is a magician, other than that it seemed like a good idea at the time). That I am still more willing to forgive Norrell's flaws than Strange's probably comments on my own character ... but I suspect the answer, correctly, will be that Strange is more in the right than Norrell. England will be seen as strange and wonderful.

Day 4 (pp494-782): John Uskglass

Does the book deserve to be this length? The length is a matter of style as much as anything; even at the climax, the pace doesn't really become anything more than 'leisurely', and the discursions and digressions are part of the fun. But part of me thinks it does go too far, and become self-indulgent, particularly around the two-thirds mark. It seems to me that Mr Strange's Venice sojurn could have been substantially trimmed without damaging the book at all. Likewise, Byron's friendship with Strange seems superfluous.

It's occurred to me that this is a curiously insulated world. Though the characters roam around Europe, for instance, only England has magic (ok, there's one mention of a Scottish magician, but that seems almost as much legend as fact, and it's certainly not contemporary). There's almost no mention of industry or science (only a brief reference to what sound like Luddite-equivalents), and other there's precious little passion apart from the passion for knowledge. It's all very mannered, very polite, which I sort of feel really should make a novel of this length dull after a while.

But it doesn't, and the couple of eruptions of actual physical violence that occur late on are perhaps all the more shocking for the rest of the novel's restraint. And what's more, despite the slight lull in the Venice segments, the last hundred pages or so of the book are, I think, as close to perfection as you could ask from this sort of story. This is in large part because Strange and Norrell are brought back together, and their dynamic is the most interesting and involving thing about the book; but also because English magic returns, really returns, and it's as wild and strong and dark as all the hints from earlier in the novel make you believe. The payoff--which changes the world--is worth the buildup.

Plus, of course, the answer to Strange and Norrell's debate about the nature of magic, and therefore the novel's debate about the nature of England, is that they're both right, and that's what makes the country special. The land is both ordered and chaotic, civilised and wild--or should be. Perhaps that's a simple statement for a book so long, but it seems to me not to matter when the journey was so very entertaining. This is certainly one of the best novels of the year.

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Other Reviews

Michel Faber in the Guardian:

Despite her flair for the fabulous, Clarke is ultimately an arch-rationalist. Magic is seen as A Bad Thing: supernatural aid is a lethal trap, the search for mystical enlightenment mimics the degradations of drug addiction, a charmed life is a Kafkaesque nightmare, Faerie-land is dismal and angst-ridden. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is likely, in the months ahead, to be enveloped in a swirling haze of acclaim. Only when this initial enchantment wears off may Clarke's admirably inventive, frequently delightful novel open up to reveal its desolate spirit and its fear of the very forces it purports to celebrate.

I disagree that magic is seen as ultimately bad; dangerous, certainly, but also necessary, I would say.

Rick Kleffel at The Agony Column:

While the title characters certainly occupy the center of the narrative, the twists in the heart of Clarke's magical alternate history are her elegant and shrewd faeries. Represented mainly by "the thistle-haired gentleman", Clarke's faeries allow the author to inject a beautifully realized dollop of the surreal into her already unreal story. These faeries aren't winged bathing beauties. They're nasty, sneaky supernatural con-men with powers that become more clearly defined as the narrative progresses and they are revealed to the two protagonists. Reminiscent of those found in the work of the great English writer Arthur Machen, these faeries have their own agenda, and suck several characters into a soul-draining netherworld. But they're incredibly entertaining to read about and fascinating foils for the nascent magicians Norrell and Strange.

This is possibly something that doesn't come across strongly enough in my account--Clarke's fairies are genuinely odd, and different to humans.

Gregory Maguire in the New York Times:

What keeps this densely realized confection aloft is that very quality of reverence to the writers of the past. The chief character in ''Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell'' isn't, in fact, either of the magicians: it's the library that they both adore, the books they consult and write and, in a sense, become. Clarke's giddiness comes from finding a way at once to enter the company of her literary heroes, to pay them homage and to add to the literature, to slot this big fat book into our own libraries of spells. In this fantasy, the master that magic serves is reverence for writing.

Farah Mendlesohn in the October 2004 New York Review of Science Fiction:

There are three very distinct sections to Jonathan Strange. Apparently, the original plan was to publish the book in three parts, and this sectioning remains distinct. Each of the three parts has its own voice: the first may seem too slow. But this snail-like pace is the point of this part of the novel: this is a much slower world, a world not yet at war. It is a pre-industrial world in which letters take a week and friends arrive unannounced and stay for a fortnight. In this context, knowledge can be hoarded; there aren't the channels through which it can leak. The arrival of Jonathan Strange and of the Peninsular War drives the change of pace; Jonathan Strange is of a different time, one in which middle-class gentlemen will seek meaningful occupation, in which messages become urgent and their effect immediate. By the end of the novel, we are in the mid-nineteenth century and just as the trains link the temporal world, rediscovered faerie paths will speed up the communication with the ethereal.

It's going to be interesting to compare this sort of world-changing with the sort that happens in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (when I eventually get around to reading that). And, indeed, with that in The Light Ages.

Gary K Wolfe in the September 2004 Locus:

The real strengths of the narrative derive from the measured, almost stately pace at which it unfolds, its increasingly cosmic perspective, the simple clarity of its plot, its richness of setting, and thewitty, often ironic narrative voice that echoes Jane Austen as much as any fantasy writer (though Clarke seems clearly aware of a broad range of fantasy traditions and styles from George MacDonald to Hope Mirrlees to Neil Gaiman). And the degree of sheer invention in the novel is quite a bit more impressive than it at first seems: not only does Clarke offer a convincingly detailed Trollopian portrait of London and Yorkshire life in the early 19th century, but she gradually reveals to us that this is in fact an alternate 19th century.

John Clute:

So the veils begin to fall. Though the Bloomsbury machine does not mention the fact that Strange is the first volume of a much larger enterprise, Clarke has made this clear in interviews; my own reading of the text would have been made much easier had I read any of these interviews in advance, as I would not have had to struggle with the presumption that Strange could be read as a tale that was meant to conclude; that this painstaking prelude to a New Story of the World was meant to comprise in itself the instauration and triumph of that new Story of the World, a new world irradiated by a magical strangeness—which it absolutely obdurately does not. Readers of this review (and of interviews with Clarke) will not have the same struggle. They will know in advance that Strange, like John Crowley's Aegypt (1987), opens the gates, but does not travel through them.

Um. Well, there are probably going to be more books in the same setting (so Clarke says on the Strange and Norrell website, at least), but they're not going to be a trilogy:

Allow me to presume on my small acquaintanceship with Susanna Clarke in order to tell you that John Clute’s assertion that Jonathan Strange was planned as the beginning of a series was entirely pulled out of John Clute’s ass. There is no such plan. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is a complete work.

Quite.

UPDATE: And it's Time Magazine's book of the year.