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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Into this very dry and delicious form of British comic writing Clarke injects her scenes of magic, a powerful, uncanny imagery that's very English, too, in its own way -- think of the intoxicating brambles of Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream." Mr. Norrell's first spell, a kind of exposition intended to cow his competitors, causes all the statues in the Cathedral at York to move and speak, a frightening racket of gravelly voices and grinding stones in which one small carving cries out over and over again about the murder of a young woman "with ivy leaves in her hair" for which it was the only witness. Later, Norrell idles a French naval squadron by blocking the mouth of a harbor with a fleet of British warships made entirely of rain. Other, briefer images seem delivered from the golden age of surrealist film: A little girl wanders into a room that "contained nothing but a high mirror. Room and mirror seemed to have quarreled at some time for the mirror showed the room to be filled with birds but the room was empty."
Occasionally the magic in "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" is as merry as a story told to children. A captured French ship features yet another carving that can be commanded by magic to speak: "a very fine figurehead in the shape of a mermaid with bright blue eyes, coral-pink lips, a great mass of sumptuous golden curls artistically strewn with wooden representations of starfish and crabs, and a tail that was covered all over with silver-gilt as if it might be made of gingerbread ... She could not at first be brought to answer any questions. She considered herself the implacable enemy of the British and was highly delighted to be given powers of speech so that she could express her hatred of them. Having passed all her existence among sailors, she knew a great many insults and bestowed them very readily on anyone who came near her in a voice that sounded like the creaking of masts and timbers in a high wind."
This exasperates her interrogator, who threatens to have the mermaid chopped up for a bonfire, "But, though French, she was also very brave and said she would like to see the man that would try to burn her. And she lashed her tail and waved her arms menacingly; and all the wooden starfish and crabs in her hair bristled."
Most of the magic in "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell," however, is more wintry and sinister -- flocks of black birds, a forest that grows up in the canals of Venice, a countryside of bleak moors that can only be entered through mirrors, a phantom bell that makes people think of everything they have ever lost, a midnight darkness that follows an accursed man everywhere he goes. It is often the work of fairies, who in this novel are not tiny darling winged sprites, but full-size people with foxlike faces and a host of bad qualities: capriciousness, indolence, malice, vanity and a habit of kidnapping mortal men and women and carrying them off to the Otherlands, their home, for an endless round of tiresome processions and balls.
For Mr. Norrell, who wants to make magic a kind of genteel science in keeping with the tenor of his times, dealing with such entities is unthinkable. But if the Augustan spirit of Jane Austen and Samuel Johnson, with its vigorous common sense, its firm ethical fiber and its serene reason and self-confidence is fundamental to Englishness, then so, too, is the muddy, bloody, instinctual spirit of the fairies, and an England that forgets this is a nation not only less powerful, but one exiled from itself. Since one of the things "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" is about is what it means to be English (and not without digs at the arrogance, provincialism and class prejudice that goes along with it), the promise of a closing of this long-standing divide is most welcome. The novel itself achieves it, and in the consummation transcends anything as parochial as national character. Susanna Clarke's magic is universal.
