Gilbert Norrell lives with a smug satisfaction caused by being the only practicing magician in Regency England. There are others who would like to study the magical arts, but he has successfully tied up the market for himself… until a young man named Jonathan Strange comes along and upends all that Mr Norrell thought he knew about magic and about working alone…
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004) was the debut novel by Susanna Clarke. A successful short story writer, she won the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards in 2005 with this absolute housebrick of a novel (1006 pages). Unfortunately, illness has prevented her from publishing much else since then, but her second novel, Piranesi (2020), was also similarly received and acclaimed. She’s brilliant, frankly.
But let’s get back to her debut. It set the world on fire when it came out and no wonder: it’s a hugely literary tome, filled with magic, a well-calculated wry but sensitive tone that suggests the novels of Jane Austen and contains an absolute cornucopia of footnotes (185, apparently).
It is that rare genre novel that becomes a mainstream success simply by virtue of capturing the zeitgeist perfectly – and even better, it remains a fantastic read twenty years later.
Filled with big ideas, it came out at a time when we enjoyed fat novels with big ideas, and we were also in the midst of a love affair with historical stories. Fantasy was also having a bit of a moment at the time: Harry Potter was still a global phenomenon; Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings films were still looming large in popular culture; Disney’s Pirates Of The Caribbean (2003) was making a spectacular transition from theme park ride to big screen, while in print there was a similar vogue for genre literature that wouldn’t get you sneered at by the literati; Mary Gentle’s Ash: A Secret History (2000) was still being talked about, while Michael Chabon’s The Adventures Of Kavalier And Klay (2001) was similarly still being held up as genre work done “respectfully.” But the only novel that you can genuinely compare to the success of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is probably David Mitchell’s sprawling epic, Cloud Atlas (2004).
Both novels play with history and tweak reader’s noses about what really happened in the past and what might happen in the future, but while Mitchell dazzled us with his stunning range of styles, settings and characters across several centuries of invented history, Clarke chose to focus on the first part of the Nineteenth Century and the literary fashions of that time.
It takes place over about a decade: it begins in Autumn 1806 and the final page closes in Spring 1817. During that time, our two magicians captivate and are feted by the ruling classes of England.
And this leads nicely into my only real criticism of the novel. And it’s a criticism that I’ve levelled at many an alternate history.
This novel posits the idea that there has been a shadow monarch ruling over the north of England for a goodly chunk of the last several centuries. It asserts the existence of fairies and magic, with a whole branch of history and folklore being invented to underpin this backstory.
So it irks me when we are presented with a made-up history that still manages to include figures such as Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, Napoleon Buonaparte and the Duke of Wellington. Surely, it would only take a few generations to alter or even obliterate the original line of history that created them?
Or it may be that I am just taking this far too seriously.
No matter: it really doesn’t affect my enjoyment of the story as I am reading, just when I’m thinking about it afterwards.
And there is a lot to enjoy and think about.
If you’re a fan of classical literature, this is one of the best recreations of that style out there. Clarke takes all the themes and ideas and sensibilities that were prominent in the era and manages to tell a thoroughly modern story about them, with all the subtlety and wit you would find in Dickens and Austen.
Because this is a novel about society and manners and how we treat other people as much as it is about magic and fairy kings.
And, like a lot of these classical novels do, it moves glacially slowly when you compare it to modern-day stories. This is a part of the charm for me: I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy a novel that takes its time to set up plot and characters, letting the reader become familiar with and a part of the world being created around them before diving headlong into speedy resolution.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell does not have a speedy resolution. But I don’t really care about that, either, because I am just enjoying the ride at the point that I realise this. The way that we follow Norrell in his stagnant monopoly slowly learning that he can have a major part in the way the world is run is an absolute delight, especially when he meets and becomes advised by such reprobates as Messrs Drawlight and Lascelles, who see an excellent opportunity to turn their penniless and aimless existences into something resembling the lives of luxury and influence that they believe themselves to deserve. Norrell trusts them at first because they are the first people he meets who seem to take an interest in his work rather than the mystique surrounding it. They are, by the way, seen as rogues by everyone else except for Norrell who comes to rely on their opinion and advice to the point that they are as surprised as much as they are affronted when he goes off to meet with politicians and generals. And they are, of course, mistrustful of Jonathan Strange who sees right through them from the moment he meets them.
But the story isn’t just about the magicians and their hangers-on. There are other characters. Norrell becomes famous in London when he restores to life the young wife of Lord Pole. However, he enlists the aid of the Gentleman with the Thistle-Down Hair, ruler of the kingdom of Lost-Hope (among others) who agrees to help, provided that Lady Hope spends half of her life with her husband and the other half with him. This Persephone allegory flavours the rest of the novel, with the magical world becoming more prominent as the book goes on. The Gentleman’s plans become more dominant – he wishes to install Stephen Black, Lord Pole’s servant, as king of England, as well as confounding the plans of Strange and Norrell – and the tone of the novel resembling that of classical fantasists like George MacDonald at times.
These parts of the novel work tremendously well, despite coming across as being silly or whimsical at times. As an example, Strange becomes an aide to the Duke of Wellington in Spain and creates magical spells to aid the British in their war against the French. These range from the practical – creating a portable road that soldiers can march along instead of the rocky, rough and occasionally marshy tracks they are used to following – to the borderline ridiculous: at several points, Strange relocates entire villages and cities to aid the war effort.
In fact, the entirety of the magical system espoused by our magicians seems extremely far removed from what we are familiar with in modern fantasy until you realise that it is entirely consistent with the magic in the fairy tales and legends of the time in which it is set. However, in the conclusion of the novel the magic begins to have the heft and weight that we have come to expect from modern fantasy, with the rules and consequences that highlight the natural order from which it has been drawn.
But, to be perfectly honest, what I really love about it is that this is a novel that reveres and emphasises the importance of books to any kind of learning. This is a book about collecting and reading books. Strange and Norrell exemplify the two main kind of readers; Norrell is a hoarder who takes an especial joy in his library and wants nothing more than to amass a massive collection for his eyes only; Strange is more of a magpie, appreciating books for their worth but not treating them with the adoration that Norrell believes they are due.
And this was the aspect of the novel that I enjoyed most when I first read it.
It’s a novel that deals with bibliophilia in a way that is frequently ignored in literature. Books and libraries are important in a lot of novels that I read, but usually as a MacGuffin more than anything else. Here we get the sense that knowledge really is power, that books do contain greatness for those who know how to read them… but mostly that books are important:
…the changing seasons excite no interest in him – he scarcely raises his eyes from the pages of his book. He takes his exercise as all gentlemen do… But he knows very little of shrubbery or park or wood. There is a book waiting for him upon the library table…
Norrell eventually learns to share his library with Strange. And Strange himself learns what Norrell appears reluctant to do: learn from the experiences of other people. He is, of course, a far more social person than Norrell, so he is predisposed to listen to what other people have to offer. Which is part of the theme of the novel, that learning and experience can come from a variety of places and that we shouldn’t be setting one over another.
This is exemplified in the storyline of Vinculus, a street magician loathed and feared by Norrell. He’s a fraud and occasional psychic who spends the latter part of the book roaming England after Norrell exiles him from his native London. Through a magical accident he winds up with a set of arcane texts tattooed across his body and his corpse becomes an item of some value and dread in the climax of the novel, more for the content than for who he is, because he only appears to be missed by Childermass, Norrell’s manservant. Everybody else, it seems, only values him for his skin.
In a book that goes out of its way to talk about how magical books are, it’s heartening to be reminded that people and what they offer is of more importance than the words they write or possess.
You can find out more about Susanna Clarke at https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/author/susanna-clarke/
