AUTHOR: Susanna Clarke
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury
RATING
5/5 "Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie"; 4/5 "David and Victoria Beckham"; 3/5 "Tom Green and Drew Barrymore"; 2/5 "Kevin Federline and Britney Spears"; 1/5 "Chris Brown and Rihanna"
SCORE: 2/5
"Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell" is a series of contradictions. It's a magical tale about the mundane, an alternate history nearly identical to our own, a comedy of manners that is itself as affected as a smoking jacket and meerschaum pipe. It's at once refreshingly new and hugely derivative, a mashup -- "The Prestige" as directed by Tim Burton and produced by Merchant Ivory. Deserved or not, it is a phenomenon.
"Jonathan Strange..." arrives like a Duchess at a royal ball, bedecked with "Best Novel" honors from the Hugo, World Fantasy and Locus awards. Its path was strewn with praise by fantasy's regining King of Cool, Neil Gaiman. The publisher reportedly paid Ms Clarke a seven-figure advance, a bet that paid off when the book peaked at number three on the New York Times bestseller list.
So it's with great trepidation that I step in front of this lumbering bandwagon as it caterpillars toward me, and say, I do not like it.
Sorry. I admire it, respect it, but I don't like it. However much I stand in awe of Ms Clarke's work, and I do, it is awesome in the same way that Stalinist architecture is awesome: the sheer scale takes your breath away, but it is hard to love the final product.
In Ms Clarke's England, magic and fairies (think "Labyrinth", not "Peter Pan") are real but forgotten, and there have been no true magicians for centuries. None, that is, until magic stages a return in the persons of scholarly and Scrooge-ish Gilbert Norrell, and talented gentleman amateur Jonathan Strange. The focus falls first on Norrell, as he rises to fame after bringing back to life the fiancee of a leading politician, then on Strange, as he first becomes Norrell's pupil but then rejects his master's timid approach. In the third act, the two are thrown back together to face the deadly consequences of Mr Norrell's earlier act of resurrection.
Ms Clarke's innovation is two-fold. First, she sets her tale not in some unpronounceable empire ruled by jockstrapping barbarians and pneumatic princesses, nor in a medieval kindgom of errant knights and distressed damsels, but in the stuffy drawing room of 19th century England. Second, the book itself is written in the Romantic style of 19th century literature. Ms Clark uses archaic spellings such as "shewed" and "chuse" in place of "showed" and "choose". The plot is episodic and the pacing not so much glacial as granitic. Finally, the nameless narrator is a keen observer of social manners and possessed of a positively Saharan sense of humor. The illusion of historicity is buttressed by hundreds of footnotes, some of them pages long, detailing an invented history of magic and folklore.
Sustaining this style and tone over the course of a 1,000+ page novel is an act of endurance on par with running back-to-back marathons. Bravo. Sadly, what should be immersive winds up being distancing. "Jonathan Strange..." has been compared to the works of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, but frankly it feels closer to "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies", a one-line joke that gets carried on for an entire novel. What's worse, the slightly mocking tone invites you to ridicule rather than sympathize witht the characters, and it is hard to find much warmth for either Norrell or Strange when the author herself regards them so coolly.
As a work of imagination, too, "Jonathan Strange..." is a bit of a letdown. No, scratch that. It positively bubbles and froths with invention and ideas. A pit they are almost all buried in the footnotes. Ms Clarke presents us with a richly-detailed, colorful backdrop, then foregrounds a rather dull, grey tale. The first three quarters of the book are so singularly lacking in incident that the language becomes not sedate but soporific. The final break between the two main characters, for example, involves a mildly critical magazine article.
Despite the hype, this is far to inaccessible a novel to merit the mantle of "Harry Potter for adults". Indeed, the book's highest accomplishment will probably to help move fantasy beyond Rowling and Tolkien wannabes. Funny that a book so rooted in the past should propel the genre forward, but hey, what's one more contradiction?
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