An otherwordly ballroom in a strange mansion is at the heart of ‘Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell’ — Image By faiz, Adobe Stock
We should all be forgiven if we long for magic in the world. The kind that can change the course of wars, so that expansionist rulers are driven to their knees. That fights against a mad manipulator who binds innocent people with dark enchantments. That causes a tiny stone statue in a cathedral to speak out against the murder of a girl that it witnessed.
Those are just a three of a great many stories and events that fill Susanna Clarke’s fantasy novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. It’s three volumes in one, so it’s easy to put down between sections and come back after a breather. But I consumed the whole enchilada, because it’s just that delicious.
At the time it was published, over 20 years ago, it was a risky proposition for Bloomsbury to publish the novel and then give it a substantial marketing push because it was written by a first-time author and isn’t exactly slim. Yet it certainly paid off, as the book became a bestseller and snagged the prestigious Hugo Award. And it’s worth it for readers (certainly this one) because it’s like visiting a strange country where everything is similar, but everything is enchanted in curious in often very amusing ways.
This is a novel for people who love elaborate, entertaining sagas with a Jane Austen, early 1800s sensibility, style of language, and occasional dry wit. It takes real-life incidents and figures — like Mad King George, the Duke of Wellington, and the Napoleonic Wars — and reshapes history with a series of magic “interventions.”
The two characters in the book’s title, Mr. Norrell and Jonathan Strange, are intent on bringing magic back to England. At the start of the book, there are scholars of magic (known as theoretical magicians), but no one in polite society who carries out spells (practical magicians) — at least, not out in public. Then this pair changes all that.
The over-arching storyline has to do with how the duo’s relationship evolves, ranging from teacher and student to intense rivals. (Imagine what it would be like for the author of a book to find that one of their former besties made all their books disappear as soon as they were bought. And the pages of the books still in the warehouse suddenly went blank. That’s the kind of shenanigans I’m “talking” about.)
The two men are a study in contrasts. Norrell is a shy, small of stature, and scholarly man who hordes his knowledge of magic. He does his best to snap up every available book on the topic and hides them away in his vast, secretive library. Strange enters the novel several chapters in. He’s charming and tall, someone who’s certainly in love with his personable wife, Arabella. However, Strange is so absorbed in the exciting nature of his magical discoveries that Arabella isn’t his top priority much of the time.
Strange is also an adventurer who helps Wellington and British troops as they fight against Napoleon by materializing paved roads when needed or moving entire towns to confuse the enemy. He wants practical magic to expand in England and begins to take on students deep into the book. And he also acknowledges an earlier and very powerful magician, known as the Raven King, who Norrell wants everyone to forget.
The one aspect of magic that neither man seems to anticipate is how their spells can backfire in a sort of “be careful what you wish for” manner. And a prime example involves one of the main plotlines. It is sparked by Norrell’s hunger to gain prestige as a magician among Britain’s ruling class. He does so not only by making statues speak in a cathedral but by bringing a dead young woman, Emma Wintertowne, back to life. This revival secures the gratitude of the well-to-do but close-to-bankrupt Sir Walter Pole, who was engaged to Emma and sorely needs her money.
This is how the book’s narrator describes the commotion this raised in society, giving an idea of the Austen-like tone of the book:
“It has been remarked (by a lady infinitely cleverer than the present author) how kindly disposed the world in general feels to young people who either die or marry. Imagine then the interest that surrounded Miss Wintertowne! No young lady ever had such advantages before: for she died upon the Tuesday, was raised to life in the early hours of Wednesday morning, and was married upon the Thursday; which some people thought too much excitement for one week.”
While everyone believes Norrell used his own magic to do this, he enlisted the help of a troublesome fairy, known throughout the book as the Gentleman With the Thistle-Down Hair, or the Gentleman.
In true fairytale fashion, the Gentleman only brings the young heiress back to life by exacting a strange form of payment: he wants half of Emma’s full lifespan. Norrell thinks that’s worth it.
We soon come to realize that Emma won’t die early. Rather, as England sleeps each night, she is whisked away to a dark otherworldly ball, hosted by the Gentleman, and she must dance all night. By morning, when she returns to the real world, she’s exhausted, depressed, and dulled over. As part of the Gentleman’s enchantment, each time she tries to explain what’s happened to her, bizarre tales escape her lips. Eventually she’s written off as deranged by her husband and sent to an asylum.
The same fate befalls Pole’s butler, Stephen Black, who is indeed Black and also very refined and well-respected. The Gentleman bestows countless rare treasures on Stephen and is intent on making him a king, which the butler thinks is mad. As with Emma, Stephen only speaks gibberish when he tries to explain how he’s made to dance all night in that strange fairy realm.
The Gentleman doesn’t stop there. Strange angers him when he tries to bring deranged King George back to his right mind — something that the fairy induced. So the Gentleman kills Strange’s wife, Arabella — at least, that’s what everyone believes. In fact, she is still alive, dancing the nights away in that hellish ball with Emma and Stephen.
As Elizabeth Hoiem wrote in in Strange Horizons, the three characters are essentially silenced — much in the way women and people of color were silenced at that time, a state that (of course) extends far beyond that period.
I’m glad that I read Clarke’s novel, Piranesi, before Strange and Norell. The later book, Piranesi, is largely set within an underground, inaccessible labyrinth, narrated by a man reduced to innocence through amnesia who goes on a quest to find his own history. It’s extraordinary (as I wrote here) and a much leaner book. Strange and Norell makes a weightier impression, literally and figuratively. It brims with so many large and small tales — some of which show up in the book’s many footnotes.
Writing Strange and Norrell didn’t come easy for Clarke. In an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio, she relates that she had some failed attempts to write contemporary novels. While she was in Bilbao, in 1992, and not very well, she reread J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and that kindled an interest in writing fantasy. She penned some short stories set in the Strange and Norrell world, which later were published as a collection, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories. It took her 10 years to write Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell itself.
Now, Clarke is reportedly writing a contemporary novel that features the Raven King, the ancient magician that seems omnipresent in Strange and Norrell.
In an interview with The New York Times just after the publication of her book The Wood at Midwinter two years ago, Clarke gave a glimpse at the complexities of her storytelling process, and the vastness of her imagination:
“‘I like stories which feel like the back of another story, like beyond this story, there’s a different story, and we’re just seeing glimpses of that story … In a way, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is the back of another story, but I wouldn’t say I know exactly what that other story is.’”
Whenever the new book is ready, I’ll be waiting.
This story originally was published by the fine folks at Counter Arts.