Summer has given up the ghost, and winter is on the march. Just when you’ve begun to daydream about spending the dimming hours tucked into your reading chair, a great, warm feast of a novel arrives, Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

The two gentlemen in the title share a most uncommon profession, for they are magicians. Not magicians of the street-corner or white-tiger varieties, but scholars very much at home in the more respectable drawing rooms of early 19th-century London. In fact, they are the only magicians left in an England besieged by the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte and shocked by the poems of Lord Byron, and together they are engaged in the monumental task of reviving the lost art of English Magic.

Their story is Jane Austen meets Harry Potter, equal parts grand fantasy and wryly funny comedy of manners; their magical endeavors shock polite society while also sparking sharp debate in several well-regarded and
briskly-selling British periodicals. Mr. Norrell is a fussy academic (imagine your most irritating and detailed-obsessed college professor) while his pupil Strange lives up to his name, cutting a dramatic figure as a brash
and dashing eccentric (one can picture Jane Eyre taking a fancy to him).
They ensorcel French armies, raise ladies from the dead, and engage in
intrigues even more convoluted than their spells.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is Clarke’s first novel, which she’s spent
the last ten years writing while working by day as an editor. She lives in
Cambridge, England, and her book practically glows with English humor and a love of British fantasy classics. It’s a novel for adults, but especially for those adults who cherished their childhood copies of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books or who grew up reading Susan Cooper’s or Lloyd Alexander’s fantastic re-working of myth and traditional stories. Clarke builds a whole world of folklore and creates an entire system of magic to add depth to the action. She also uses a clever profusion of footnotes to drop juicy hints and to tell miniature side stories that embroider the larger whole.

The book is pure fun, a grand celebration of storytelling and imagination
that would do J. K. Rowling or Neil Gaiman proud. It’s the perfect
accompaniment to a blustery day and a mug of tea.

I hope Clarke writes another one in time for next winter...

Review by Mark Bradshaw, October 7, 2004

If you like grand, sophisticated fantasy novels, read about Little, Big by John Crowley: http://www.watermarkbooks.com/review0603-003.html
 

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