Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (by Susanna Clarke) As soon as I put the book down I was immediately sad, because it was over and I was sure that I would not read another book quite like it again. This book was a one-off – a blend of early nineteenth-century fabulous literature with the modern taste for simple, no-questions-asked magic, and utterly driven by the strength of the characters. Carrying it around was like carrying a brick, but it never weighed me down, and I don’t think I’ve ever thought of a book that was nearly 850 pages long as being far too short. I put it down saying to myself, ‘Pete, I think that was probably the best book you’ve ever read’. Its power lay in the strength of its characters. Gilbert Norrell, a secretive and jealous old Yorkshire magician who gives himself the grand task of restoring English magic, took on the incredibly likeable and eternally curious Jonathan Strange as his student, only to end up hopelessly in his shadow. Creeping through the shadow of every page was the mysterious historical figure, the Raven King, who ruled northern England centuries ago when magic and fairy-servants were very real and very un-theoretical. Their world, while being the very real world of Wellington, Napoleon and mad King George, was nonetheless an alternate-England, with an elaborate parallel history, played out in chapter-length footnotes. The consistent use of archaic spellings such as “chuse”, “scissars” and “ancles” was welcoming not only for helping this wannabe time-traveller go back to the time of Dickensian surnames and murky gaslight, but also because I’d recently read a Terry Pratchett book that had been re-edited for the American market by a five-year-old, and was subsequently riddled with so many typographical errors that it resembled a drunken effort with magnetic poetry. Thankfully Clarke’s usage was purposeful, and Bloomsbury USA had opted to leave it all be, even if it means Americans think we spell control with a ‘u’. I read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell a couple of days after finishing the shorter but much longer American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. I’d been meaning to read Norrell for some time, but my mind was set when I read Gaiman’s lengthy post-novel thank-you notes, which included a shout-out to Ms Clarke, who by that time had not even finished her colossal debut. Gaiman has since referred to Norrell as “unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years.” This is a bit of a shame, really, because it doesn’t leave much that can honestly follow it. So I’ve decided to read something of a different tone, something that I’ve always meant to read but never have, a book which has not an alternate history exactly, but alternate future, Orwell’s 1984. Yet for all the political prophesy of Big Brother and the Thought Police, no literary image has stuck with me as much as when Jonathan Strange stepped out of the mirror and into a Hampstead drawing-room, smiling and bidding his hostess “good evening”. Now I look for the King’s Roads every time I have a shave. Read between May 9 & June 18, 2006
"He will walk into that mirror and he will not come out again."
10.7.06 22:34
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