This is an excellent work of fantasy. Hell, it’s an excellent work of fiction. It has one huge drawback though, somewhat related to it’s immense length (1006 pages), the first 400 or so pages can be skimmed. They are slow-moving, and much of it serves little point.
Like several other books, this one tells the stories of two feuding magicians. In this universe, magic is real but has been quite dead in England for several hundred years. Magicians are people who read and study old books of magic and magical history. But they don’t perform any magic. They are unable. Along comes a magician who fancies himself a practical magician, Mr. Norrell. After demonstrating his work, he proceeds to get the English government to employ him in the war against the French, and afterward, as the governments lone magician. The second magician who comes along is Jonathan Strange. At the beginning he is a pupil of Mr. Norrell’s, but they go their separate ways over several issues. First, Mr. Norrell wants to control all magic, and denies Mr. Strange the use of the only library of magical books in England. The second is that Norrell has decided that the ancient king and magician John Uskglass and all his cohort of fairy servants are not fit subjects for study by English magicians. Being that Uskglass was the most powerful magician of all time, Strange wants to make use of his magic, which Norrell forbids.
In order to establish himself, Norrell had called upon a fairy to raise the wife of a government minister from the dead. In order to resurrect Lady Pole, Norrell needed the assistance of a fairy. But in doing so, the fairy enchanted Lady Pole, as well as several other people, and generally set about to cause all sorts of problems for England, including against Strange.
I’m not really sure why this book was so frequently compared to the Harry Potter series. Other than being about England and magic, the similarities are few to none. It seems like every review I read started off by saying the reviewer was expected Harry Potter for adults
. It’s not.
Ms. Clarke has built up an exceedingly well-thought-out and complete magical universe. Despite the length of the novel, most parts of it connect with other parts. They serve purposes which are revealed as you read.
Norrell is an unlikable character. Clarke intended for him to be unlikable. I didn’t like him so much because through the first half of the book he’s simply a crotchety old man. Then there’s a brief bit where he gets a bit more two-dimensional as Strange parts ways with him. And towards the end he starts becoming a character in which I was interested. Strange though, I liked him throughout. Both in the sense that he’s a character I like, and also a character that I thought was more interesting. The problem with Norrell was that his motivations were pretty simple. Strange on the other hand had all sorts of conflicting motivation: his responsibility for restoring magic, his curiosity about magic, his desire to help England, his devotion to his wife Arabella to name a few. Norrell simply wants to be the pointy-headed boss, and magic is his vehicle. Oh, he expresses words to the effect that he enjoys magic, but his actions bely that.
Clarke also did a great job of developing all the side characters with the exception of John Uskglass, the ancient magician. Because our only contact with him is through writings about him, often having gone through two or three steps in the game of phone tag, and revealed to us only through Strange or Norrell, I never really got a feel for what kind of person he was. I suppose that’s sort of the point, otherwise the conflict between Norrell and Strange over Uskglass would be fairly uninteresting to a reader. Still, as his magic becomes more important to the story, it felt like there was something missing about him. The other minor characters like Childermass, Lascelles, Arabella, Stephen, etc., had plenty of depth and made for good reading.
I don’t know that I would put the book on the pedestal on which it seems to have perched. But it’s a pretty good fantasy novel.
Title: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Author: Susanna Clarke
Illustrator: Portia Rosenberg
Imprint / Publisher: Tor / Holtzbrinck
Format: Mass market paperback
Publication date: August 2006 (September 2004 in hardcover)
Length: 1006 p.
ISBN-10: 0-765-35615-5
Subject: Teacher-student relationships — Fiction
Subject: Magicians — Fiction
Subject: Fairies — Fiction
Subject: London (England) — Fiction
Subject: York (England) — Fiction
LC classification: PR6103.L375 J65 2004
