‘It has been remarked (by a lady infinitely cleverer than the present author) how kindly disposed the world in general feels to young people who either die or marry. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell definitely has its merits, particularly with regards to the style and the in-depth re-imagination of a magical English past, but one must not turn a blind eye to some of its definite shortcomings.
Eventually Strange's heedless pursuit of long-forgotten magic threatens to destroy not only his partnership with Norrell, but everything that he holds dear.‘Un questionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years’ says the renowned Neil Gaiman about Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, however, one cannot help but wonder which books Mr Gaiman actually placed into the category of the ‘fantastic’ so that they ended up overtaken by Clarke’s gargantuan novel. 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. 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. But it soon becomes clear that their ideas of what English magic ought to be are very different. Astonished to find another practicing magician, Mr Norrell accepts Strange as a pupil. Strange thinks nothing of enduring the rigors of campaigning with Wellington's army and doing magic on battlefields. Jonathan Strange is handsome, charming, and talkative-the very opposite of Mr Norrell. 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.Īll goes well until a rival magician appears. He goes to London and raises a beautiful young woman from the dead. They can only write long, dull papers about it, while fairy servants are nothing but a fading memory.īut 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. But by the early 1800s they have long since lost the ability to perform magic.
She has created a world so thoroughly enchanting that eight hundred pages leave readers longing for more.Įnglish magicians were once the wonder of the known world, with fairy servants at their beck and call they could command winds, mountains, and woods. Sophisticated, witty, and ingeniously convincing, Susanna Clarke's magisterial novel weaves magic into a flawlessly detailed vision of historical England.
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