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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Although it becomes urgent toward the novel's end, initially the pace is leisurely, as Clarke wanders through a series of anecdotes and small scenes, all liberally embellished with footnotes and asides and all of it almost ridiculously witty, imaginative and diverting. Clarke has invented an extensive history of English magic, complete with dozens of rare and learned texts, common misperceptions and even disappointments. "Like many spells with unusual names," one footnote informs us, "the Unrobed Ladies was a great deal less exciting than it sounded. The ladies in the title were only a kind of woodland flower."
Spells themselves are relatively scarce in the opening chapters. Clarke devotes more of her novel's first pages to sharp and sparkling descriptions of Strange and Norrell's social world and the people who inhabit it. All of this is seamlessly woven into real history and the lives of actual people. Of an important man who will prove essential to Norrell's plans, she writes:
"Sir Walter Pole was 42 and, I'm sorry to say, quite as clever as any one else in the Cabinet. He had quarreled with most of the great politicians of the age at one time or another and once, when they were both very drunk, had been struck over the head with a bottle of Madeira by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Afterwards Sheridan remarked to the Duke of York, 'Pole accepted my apologies in a handsome, gentleman-like fashion. Happily, he is such a plain man that one scar more or less can make no significant difference' ...
"Some years ago his friends in the Government had got him the position of Secretary-in-Ordinary to The Office of Supplication, for which he received a special hat, a small piece of ivory and seven hundred pounds a year. There were no duties attached to the place because no one could remember what The Office of Supplication was supposed to do or what the small piece of ivory was for."
The unflappable authority and precision of this voice, the detail that the bottle contained Madeira, the duke's clubby quip preserved for the ages, the feudal curiosity of the Office of Supplication -- this perfectly reproduces the tone of a classic work of British history or biography, and that alone is amusing. But Clarke is particularly droll when she applies the judicious manner of the historian to the stuff of fairy tales. A footnote relating a story about a magic ring describes what happens when the ring is absent-mindedly set down next to three eggs. From one egg hatches "a stringed instrument like a viola, except that it had little arms and legs and played sweet music upon itself with a tiny bow." From another comes "a ship of purest ivory with sails of fine white linen and a set of silvery oars," and from the last "a chick with strange red and gold plumage." The first two marvels soon vanish, "but the bird grew up and later started a fire that destroyed most of Grantham. During the conflagration it was observed bathing itself in the flames. From this circumstance, it was presumed to be a phoenix."
"Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" brims with minor characters whose vivacity recalls the great caricatures of Dickens, from unctuous social climbers and dithering aristocrats to supercilious rakes and the formidable Duke of Wellington. Upon being informed that several Neapolitan corpses reanimated by Strange are speaking "one of the dialects of Hell," the Duke remarks, "'They have learned it very quickly ... They have only been dead three days.' He approved of people doing things promptly and in a businesslike fashion."
