alien romances: Karen S. Wiesner {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Friday, September 01, 2023

Karen S. Wiesner {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

by Karen S. Wiesner

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke is an epic "alternative history" fantasy that was the author's debut novel. Clarke spent ten years writing the book, which has an interesting history of its own. Clarke first developed the idea while she was teaching English in Spain (lol). She'd had a waking dream about a man in 18th-century clothes…and felt strongly that he had some kind of magical background--he'd been dabbling in magic, and something had gone badly wrong."

Shortly after returning to her home country, she signed up for a writing workshop, co-taught by a man she would eventually become romantically involved with. Students attending the workshop were expected to come with a short story they'd written, but all Clarke had were "bundles" of materials for Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. As the tale goes, she'd extracted a piece of it about three women secretly practicing magic who are discovered by Jonathan Strange. (Later, this tale was published in the Starlight 1 anthology as well as included in the author's own collection called The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories.) The workshop co-host was so impressed by this work, he sent an excerpt to his good friend, fantasy author Neil Gaiman who was astounded by the author's "assurance": "It was like watching someone sit down to play the piano for the first time and she plays a sonata."

Interesting to note that Clarke's agent sold the unfinished novel in 2003 to Bloomsbury. They were so impressed with and certain it would be an international bestseller that they gave her a £1 million pound advance as well as printing an unheard of number of hardcover copies in three separate countries simultaneously while having 17 translations begun before its first English publication.

Learning how Clarke went about writing this book explained a lot to me. Apparently, she didn't write it start to finish but in fragments that she then had to "stitch" together. I found everything about this long novel meticulous and well-written, if a little slow moving and, at times, lacking in finely honed purpose and action. It was also written in the style of many 19-century books, like those written by Jane Austen. Not surprisingly, I love stories like these, and Clarke's felt authentic to me right from the first page, as it's set in a 19th-century "alternate" England around the time of the Napoleonic Wars. At the time the story opens, magic use has faded into the past, but Mr. Norrell intends to bring it back. How he does that involves raising a woman from the dead in a highly public way that puts magic back in fashion, as well as summoning an army of ghostly ships that terrify the country's enemy. Another novice magician (introduced much, much later in the book, other than in a footnote in the first chapter) emerges in opposition to the first, and one who is the very antithesis of Norrell.

In what I consider a stroke of genius, the author puts her own invented magical history in 200 footnotes throughout the book, something that apparently Clarke didn't expect to be published but which added an authenticity that the story might have otherwise lacked without it. The author believed that grounding magic in real life surroundings was what produced realism in the fantasy aspects of her story.

I don't deny that some reviewers and readers were put off by how "the plot creaks frightfully in many places and the pace dawdles" and insisted that trimming was necessary. Still, others like myself found it an engaging read filled with imagination and style. The origin and/or the source of magic has thus far almost always been left uncredited in countless works of fiction, as if somehow magic just appears in the fingertips of some people. How can that not beg a thousand questions about where it came from and what was done to put it there? Here in this novel, we're at last clued into the fact that magic is given or bargained for from beings that exist in another realm. That's one of the things I liked best about this book. Additionally, there's an exploration here concerning how magic sometimes manifests in ways the wielder isn't intending. These two concepts make Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell the logical favorite of mine because there's an eerie backdrop that questions the morality and lack of responsibility magicians give their art as a whole.

One other slightly off-putting aspect of this story is the way it ends. To me (and other reviewers and readers), it felt like the story was started here; by no stretch of the imagination was it finished. After I read it, I was fine with that because I assumed the author intended either a sequel or a series. I've since learned that Clarke had begun a follow-up novel in 2004 (the year the first was published) set a few years after Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell ended, continuing the tale. Because it took her ten years to complete the first, it made sense that the second might also take at least that long. But, with Clarke being plagued by chronic fatigue syndrome, she chose to write a simpler story that required less of her, and that became her second novel in 2020 (16 years after her first). As to the fate of the sequel, the author herself says it's still “a long way off” completion. Or it may simply not be forthcoming at all. I've made my peace with that, even if I hope the author has the strength to complete it someday. I suspect part of my disappointment with the way the novel ended was that I simply didn't want it to end. I wanted more of the characters and their story. However, that doesn't make the novel any less tremendous. It's one that lovers of magic and fantasy would be remiss if they didn't pick up. If the 1000-page-plus novel intimidates, the book was very faithfully adapted for a BBC miniseries in 2015, and that is also definitely worth watching.

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