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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Susanna Clarke's "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" combines the dark, wild spirit of English fantasy with the grand wit and high style of the 19th century social novel. It's a grand performance -- and the most sparkling literary debut of the year.
Sep 4, 2004 | It may be just as well that Susanna Clarke's first novel, "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell," is nearly as big as a house, since this is the kind of book you want to move into and settle down in for a long stay. It's set in a world very much like the England of the early 1800s, only in Clarke's version magic was once a daily presence and has since been lost or perhaps merely misplaced. In other words, this world resembles the world of our own reading, for most of us can remember a time when stepping into a book was like entering into an enchantment.
Even if, as adults, we have learned to read differently and to appreciate other books that don't necessarily cast the same spell, most of us continue to yearn for that magic and to cherish the rare book that can still work it. We may admire those other, possibly greater books, but the ones that enchant us -- "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" is destined to join that company -- are the books we love. Some people might call this regressive, and perhaps it is. But the nature of love is to be regressive and irrational and irresponsible, and life without it would be a drab thing indeed.
The England of "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" has drifted away from its magical past and lingers on the momentous cusp between the intellectual splendors of Enlightenment reason and the nitty-gritty convulsions of industrialization. All of English fantasy is an argument between the wild and the civilized, but Clarke takes an unconventional position by seeing value in each. Although "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" is about magic -- specifically about the two eponymous magicians, who seek to return English magic to its former glory -- it is also about a certain literary voice, the eminently civilized voice of early 19th century social comedy. That voice reached its pinnacle in Jane Austen and, for all its reason, its common sense and skeptical wit, it works its own brand of sorcery. It seems impossible to combine two such contradictory literary delights, but Clarke does it with ease.
The plot of the novel is simple enough. Mr. Norrell, a formerly reclusive, book-hoarding scholar, emerges on the London scene as something previously considered extinct: a "practical" magician. ("Theoretical" magicians, men who study the magic of the Middle Ages but wouldn't dream of attempting it, are much more common.) His unprepossessing appearance notwithstanding, "within Mr. Norrell's dry little heart there was [a] lively ambition to bring back magic to England." He can't tolerate the idea of a potential rival, however, so he devotes most of his time to squelching everyone else's aspirations in that department.
Until, that is, he meets Jonathan Strange, a rich young gentleman of undeniable talent, who offers himself as Norrell's pupil and a more socially polished representative of "modern magic." They make an excellent team. Norrell prefers to hole up in his library, while Strange is much better suited to a key element of Norrell's campaign: using magic to assist the stalled British war effort against Napoleon. Britain's ministers send the intrepid Strange off to Portugal, where he enjoys a series of thrilling adventures under the command of the Duke of Wellington.
The collaboration eventually hits the rocks when Strange grows restless and preoccupied with the Raven King, a shadowy figure who ruled Northern England from 1111 to 1434. According to Mr. Norrell, the Raven King embodies everything primitive, unruly and dangerous about their art; he must be repudiated if magic is to become truly useful and, most important of all, respectable. The King, Strange counters, "stands at the very heart of English magic, and we ignore him at our peril." Strange's pursuit of the Raven King brings him dangerously close to a secret, a secret that concerns the feat of magic that brought Mr. Norrell into the confidence of the nation's most powerful men.
