Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
English magicians were once the wonder of the known world, with fairy servants at their beck and call; they could command winds, mountains, and woods. But by the early 1800s they have long since lost the ability to perform magic. They can only write long, dull papers about it, while fairy servants are nothing but a fading memory.
But at Hurtfew Abbey in Yorkshire, the rich, reclusive Mr Norrell has assembled a wonderful library of lost and forgotten books from England’s magical past and regained some of the powers of England’s magicians. He goes to London and raises a beautiful young woman from the dead. Soon he is lending his help to the government in the war against Napoleon Bonaparte, creating ghostly fleets of rain-ships to confuse and alarm the French.
All goes well until a rival magician appears. Jonathan Strange is handsome, charming, and talkative-the very opposite of Mr Norrell. Strange thinks nothing of enduring the rigors of campaigning with Wellington’s army and doing magic on battlefields. Astonished to find another practicing magician, Mr Norrell accepts Strange as a pupil. But it soon becomes clear that their ideas of what English magic ought to be are very different. For Mr Norrell, their power is something to be cautiously controlled, while Jonathan Strange will always be attracted to the wildest, most perilous forms of magic. He becomes fascinated by the ancient, shadowy figure of the Raven King, a child taken by fairies who became king of both England and Faerie, and the most legendary magician of all. Eventually Strange’s heedless pursuit of long-forgotten magic threatens to destroy not only his partnership with Norrell, but everything that he holds dear.
In a world where too many fantasy novels rely on tropes and archetypes to supply the fantastical, intriguing elements of their stories, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke is a breath of fresh air. This novel, grounded in the society of early 19th century England, is fantasy redefined and reimagined.
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Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is one of those reading experiences that stands out from the rest not just for the simple enjoyment of the story being told, but because of the slow nature of how it’s told. Like several other favorites of mine, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell takes its time, letting the story unfold without any sense of urgency and sparing no detail. Despite the far-reaching scope and timeline of the story, every page feels remarkably detailed and intimate, not sweeping and detached despite the years and cast of characters covered. More remarkable, however, was the fact that at no point during the reading experience did I have an idea of where the story would go. Though there’s a simmering, slow-building something throughout the novel, there’s no obvious plot. Most novels have a general enough structure that readers are able to understand the ways in which the story will come to its climax or how it could end. There is no such understanding in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and it made for a strange, though enjoyable, sense of wonder and intrigue. At nearly 800 pages, this novel requires readers to settle in and settle down for a long, meandering story that sweeps readers up into a world of unique magic and unexpected happenings. And though I couldn’t have predicted any of it, the story that came together was fantastically entertaining, rich, and thoroughly satisfying.
While there is certainly no lack of magic within Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, it lends itself to the story in such a way that creates a quiet fantastical atmosphere. In fact, the whole book could be defined by the term “quiet fantasy.” The elements of typical fantasy are all there—magic, magicians, mysterious prophecies, faeries—but they are subdued, though no less potent, by and within the atmosphere of genteel English society. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell tackles the idea of magic and all its implications in a way that feels brilliantly realistic and possible. The magic itself is a thing without shape, something readers don’t come close to fully understanding. While magic defined by these terms can sometimes be a shortcoming within other authors’ world building, it feels natural and mystical within the pages of this novel. It is not ill-defined, it is the magic the way we imagine it as children—loose and wild and always unexpected, requiring barely more than the flick of a magician’s hand (at least this is how it appears to readers, the magicians and their endless hours of studies would say differently). And yet the treatment of it is as much a contradiction to my previous statement as possible in ways only English gentlemen of the age could imagine treating magic—with books and theories and history, making a life out of magic by applying gentlemanly and scholarly attitudes toward it. “English magic”—the inherently English nature of the magic and what it meant to England as a land, people, and government—was a unique take on a society’s dealings with magic that was brilliantly built upon the foundations of real English society. The historical mythology of this version of England—with faeries and the distant, mysterious figure of the Raven King—was fantastically interesting. Woven flawlessly into the story itself, readers are able to learn more in the footnotes (yes! a novel with footnotes!) that gave us further glimpses of the stories, magic, and magicians English magic was built upon.
A story without much of an obvious plot that asks readers to spend nearly 800 pages within its world could be something of a nightmare in the wrong hands. Thankfully, each page, character, and moment of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was utterly entertaining, well written, and well crafted with prose that felt of the period as if the story were being told by someone who was there. There was a wonderful sense of humor within the writing, as well. It was everything I wanted it to be; a story with rich detail, whimsical oddities, and a comfortingly familiar English gentlemanly setting that provided a unique foundation for such a fantastical tale.
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was a compelling and wonderfully unique fantasy novel. With a quiet, atmospheric approach, Clarke weaves an engrossing tale of distinctly English magic and the magicians that wield it. Far from typical fantasy, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a novel I would recommend to both fantasy fans and those who aren’t typically drawn to the genre. It’s simply brilliant.