JONATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORREL

Susanna Clarke’s debut, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell has been bruited abroad for over a year since it was bought by Bloomsbury; reputedly ten years in the writing, it has so far garnered its author a million pounds in advances.

The premise is tantalising. Clarke has imagined an England in which magic is still studied, in a purely academic fashion, but not practised. The Learned Society of York Magicians, curious as to this state of affairs, seeks out Mr. Norrell, whose appetite for collecting every available book both of and about magic is the most open sign of a costive and cautious nature. He persuades them both of his skill as a practical magician and of the need for them to desist their own study of it. When he arrives in London, Norrell crowns his reputation by raising from the dead the beautiful wife of his patron, Sir Walter Pole. From then on politicians and noblemen regard him with awe and seek to befriend him.

Unknown to everyone, however, the means by which Norrell revives Lady Pole does this is to make a bargain with a fairy – a “gentleman with thistledown hair” – who agrees to share half her life. The unforeseen effects of the pact is that while seemingly present in our world, she is dancing the night away in Faerie. Sir Walter’s dignified, thoughtful black manservant, Stephen, is also made to drag through his working life in a stupor while the thistle-haired gentleman showers him with gifts, renders King George mad, and murders numerous women, all the while believing himself to be a true friend and benefactor.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Strange has also set himself up as a practical magician (having failed at everything else.) As passionate and impulsive as Norrell is measured and cautious, he has a charming wife, Arabella, but few magic books. The younger magician becomes Norrell’s pupil, thinking his teacher “at one and the same time the most remarkable man of the Age and the most tedious.” Strange’s conviction that magic stems from the mysterious Raven King of medieval times is soon vehemently at odds with Norrell’s hope that English magic “should be regarded as a quiet, respectable sort of profession”, second only to entering the Church. Strange decamps for Spain, where he aids the sceptical Wellington to win numerous campaigns by altering the weather, the flow of rivers and even the position of whole cities. Yet when asked by the great general whether he could kill by magic, he answers, “I suppose a magician might, but a gentleman never could.”

This, in other words is a tale of magic such as might have been written by the young Jane Austen – or, more accurately, the young Mrs. Radcliffe, whose gothic imagination and exuberant delicacy of style sets the key. Herein lies both its originality and its dissonance. As pastiche, it is a good joke, though not one worthy of 800 pages. As fantasy, it is deplorable, failing to understand the essentially anarchic nature of such tales. What is so wonderful about magicians, wizards, and all witches other than Morgan le Fay is not just their magical powers but that they possess these despite being of low birth or common stock. Far from caring about being gentlemen, wizards are the ultimate expression of talent being irrelevant to rank; and if both Ursula le Guin and JK Rowling are almost vehement on this point it is perhaps because historically, fairy-tales were captured and bowdlerised by the aristocracy to the degree that you could well believe magic, like fox-hunting and private education, to be the preserve of posh people.

Clarke has a combination of scholarship, quirkiness and gift for descriptive prose that is so engaging one can’t believe she takes this stuffy Georgian nonsense seriously: there are too many touches of humour, especially in the footnotes which solemnly recount myths and tales of wonder before doubting them. It does, however, preclude at least this reader from falling in love with her book. Buried inside its monstrous bulk is, in fact, a wonderful tale about a marriage lost and found, but it becomes evident only in the last 200 pages when Strange’s lively, sympathetic wife is also stolen away by the fairies; the parallels between madness and the glamour of enchantment are drawn with sympathy and skill. How Strange sets both Arabella and Lady Pole free at the cost of his own liberty, and how the only engaging character, Stephen Black, does indeed become a king almost makes the slog through the rest of the novel worth it. But as it stands, it is neither an addition to the canon of great fantasy literature, nor worthy of its Booker long-listing.

The New Statesman, October 2004