Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

I think it might have been Dr Johnson* who said that if you want to understand what nobody else does, you should read what everyone else is reading one year later. If, on the other hand you aspire to total cultural irrelevance, you should wait as long as I have waited to read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

In case you have forgotten in the intervening years, the book is set in a sort of alternative version of Regency England where magic has existed at one point, but the art has subsequently been lost. It is about two rival magicians who reinvent it: the dry-as-dust Mr Norrell and his sometime pupil the charming, cavalier Jonathan Strange.

So, about a decade ago my bookish friends either thought that this was the book the printing press was made for or over-long, over-hyped and impossible to finish. I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Yes, it is very, very long. And most of the story seems to happen in the final 25% of the pages. But it's the kind of book you can loose yourself in.

And it's set in the Regency. In the time of Jane Austen and of Blackadder II. A time of fops and dandies and highwaymen! The Romantics! The Enlightenment! The era of Georgette Heyer's bodice rippers! I don't like to think of myself as a dreamy romantic but I think I have a bit of a thing for the Regency...

I like the way faeries are presented in the book; pitiless, inhuman creatures with powerful magic, driven by pride and vanity. Another aspect I enjoyed is the way that the Raven King, John Uskglass lurks in the backstory throughout the novel. A medieaval magician who ruled northern England then vanished abruptly leaving behind legends of his return. By the end we see that he has been manipulating the entire cast of the book in aid of political machinations in Faerie.

I think what I really liked about Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is the fact that underneath it all the story is actually a bromance. The two main characters have a natural antipathy but eventually learn mutual appreciation. The world comes between them in the form of the Napoleonic wars, Strange's wife, malevolent faeries and Norrell's sychophantic hangers-on. In spite of all this, by the end of the book they are "chained together like Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis"** but kind of loving it.



*One of very few historical characters from the Regency period not to feature in this novel.
**Thankyou, Mr Rimmer.