Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Reviewed by DAVID LARSEN

Why is this book only 800 pages long? I want a case of short-term amnesia, so I can forget all about it and read it again for the first time.

The American critic and author Michael Swanwick once wrote that great fantasy novels tend to be "unschoolable and ungroupable ... strange and shaggy
literary creatures that have no ilk or kin, and that mathematically can be contained in no set smaller than the set of all sets contained in no other sets".

Susanna Clarke's first novel is a perfect case-in-point. To begin with, this book's most obvious influence is that well-known fantasy author, Jane Austen. It isn't laughably absurd to imagine someone bringing off a halfway decent facsimile of Austen's style, though not many people have ever managed it; but a Jane Austen
fantasy novel? What next, a tragic character study in the style of Enid Blyton?

Here's how the book opens: "Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They were gentleman magicians, which is to say they had never harmed anyone by magic — nor ever done anyone the slightest good. In fact, to own the truth, not one of these magicians had ever cast the smallest spell, nor by magic caused one leaf to tremble upon a tree, made one mote of dust to alter its course or changed a single hair upon anyone's head. But, with this one minor reservation, they enjoyed a reputation as some of the wisest and most
magical gentlemen in Yorkshire."

Instantly we're plunged deep into a world that hasn't existed for more than 100 years. Clarke's 19th century prose is entirely artificial, but there's nothing fake about it: this is a historical novel written in something very close to the high literary style of its chosen period.

The opening chapters, in which we first meet the
unpleasant Mr Norrell and watch him make his first
bumbling attempts at restoring the practice of magic to respectability, are easy to slot into the gaps in Austen's extant writing: acid social comedy set in a part of society — the London political scene — which she never turned her attention to, but easily could have.

As the story progresses, we're taken to places Austen never dreamed of going — to the battlefields of the Napoleonic wars, to Italy, and to the Tolkien-lands of Faerie. We meet Mr Norrell's rebellious pupil, Jonathan Strange; we meet Byron and the Duke of Wellington; we meet sinister and curiously disturbing fairies.

But Austen is always there in the tone and style of the book, and somehow the unlikely fusion works. Not only is this an amusing, absorbing historical novel, it's also the first great fantasy novel to be published since J. K Rowling and Peter Jackson made fantasy fashionable again, a reminder of what fantasy can be when it stops trying to recycle Tolkien and draws on the same deep wells of fairy tale and mythology Tolkien used himself.

Though Mr Norrell at first seems a small-minded, fussy, essentially harmless individual, the magic he
practises is wild, frightening, and entirely convincing. As the story becomes more involved, and the rivalry between the two magicians more intense, Clarke's seemingly
effortless wielding of the symbolic language of myth
generates a sense of real power and equally real menace.

The book has some of the vices of its virtues. Its trenchant comic style can occasionally register as overly flippant. Clarke uses footnotes to fill us in on the history and traditions she's invented for English magic; these footnotes, though interesting, tend to be lengthy, and to turn up just when you're eager to find out what happens on the next page, and if you neglect them, parts of the story will elude you.

Clarke develops her characters obliquely, leaving a great deal unsaid; and though for the most part this works very well, there are one or two aspects of the book which would work better if we had more access to their inner thoughts. In particular, one of the more important minor characters — Mr Norrell's enigmatic servant, Childermass — keeps seeming to shift from persona to persona, as though Clarke's sense of who he was never quite jelled.

But these are quibbles. Make no mistake, this is a grand achievement. I read it as slowly as I could, and even so it was over far too soon. It reputedly took Clarke 10 years to write, which I can well believe — but does that mean I have to wait a whole decade for her to write
another?

* David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer


* Bloomsbury, $39.99