Book Review: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Susanna Clark

2004

Awards: Hugo
Nominations: Nebula

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

In the ever-expanding pantheon of novels about English magicians, this book stands somewhere just below the tolerable middle.

Its characters, settings, and central plot are good. But it is dragged down by self-conscious, tiresome drollery and by uninteresting, irrelevant footnotes and side stories. If a strong editorial hand had just removed even half of the non-contributing chatter from its nearly 800 pages, what a tighter, more fun reading experience it would have been.

The book is an alternate history that takes place in the early 1800s. Dr. Gilbert Norrell and his student, Jonathan Strange, are English magicians whose goal is to bring magic back to their country.

Yes, back to England. Because, you see, a long time ago, in the eleventh century or so, a wizard king named John Uskglass, a.k.a. The Raven King, came to power in the north of England. He was human but had been raised in the magical land of Faerie, and the very rocks and trees and rivers were his allies and servants. It was a time of magic and wonder. The Raven King ruled for about 300 years and then disappeared, but the people and the land are still hoping for his return.

Dr. Norrell is the first real magician to practice in England since the Raven King’s reign. He is a stuffy, almost sociophobic academic. He repudiates the Raven King’s legacy, saying his traditions are unnecessary for modern magicians and it is better not to invoke him. 

Norrell is also extremely possessive of his magical knowledge. He says that he wants to bring magic back to England, but he seems to think that no one is fit to practice it but him. He buys up any books on magic he finds and keeps them in his own library so no one else can read them. He is urged to write books and take on more students, and says he will, but he never does.

                                                                   

Jonathan Strange is the only pupil Norrell is willing to have. Strange admires Norrell’s ability but becomes increasingly frustrated by his reclusiveness. Strange really does want to spread magic to all of England, feeling that everyone and anyone who wants to practice magic should do so.

Early in the story, the young wife of one of Dr. Norrell’s associates falls ill and dies. Norrell is persuaded to bring her back to life. To do so, however, Norrell secretly has to stoop to using black magic, invoking a faerie to help him. This malicious faerie continues to exact painful tributes from Norrell's friends far after the magic has been performed, growing more and more dangerous and lethal over the years.

At the same time, Norrell and Strange are enlisted by the English government to assist (magically) in the Napoleonic wars. Norrell wages his war behind the lines, in England, cloistered with government ministers. Strange, instead, goes to Spain to fight alongside the front-line soldiers, working his way up and eventually becoming a trusted advisor to the Duke of Wellington.

Strange’s wartime experiences give him the boost of status and self-confidence he needs to start breaking his ties of dependency with Norrell. He begins practicing his own expansive and generous brand of magic, becoming more and more estranged from his tutor and taking on students of his own.

Eventually, however, Strange and Norrell have to try to reconcile their differences and unite to destroy the malicious faerie—if they can.

Strange, Norrell, and their immediate associates are quirky, interesting characters. And their primary challenges—Napoleon’s armies, the malicious faerie, the Raven King’s legacy—have great entertainment potential. But these positive elements are diluted by page upon page of semi-relevant asides, tangents, and secondary stories that contribute nothing to the main plot. It is as if the author’s prodigious ideaphoria was completely unfettered by editorial discipline.

The longest side stories usually came in the form of footnotes. If a specific parable about the Raven King was mentioned in passing by one of the characters, for example, there was sure to be an extensive footnote telling the entire parable. These footnotes themselves often sprang off into still other, even more tangential stories. It would have been fine if the footnotes had added to the story, or at least been clever and fun. But instead they felt like a disruptive waste of time, leaving me a bit frustrated when the footnote ended and I had to remind myself where I was and what was happening in the main story. 

Sometimes these footnotes took up more room on the page than did the actual text of the story, and they occasionally spilled over onto subsequent pages. Picking my way through the distractions to get through to the central story line began to get exhausting. I began to dread the appearance of each new footnote. By the time the story finally really kicked into gear around page 600, I was too tired to care much what happened.

A lesser, but contributory, problem is Clarke’s often clunky efforts to achieve a Jane-Austen-like droll wittiness in her writing. She tried very hard, with her descriptions of overly fussy aristocratic women and befuddled, head-in-the-clouds society gentlemen who mess up situations with their indecision and their focus on irrelevant details, but it fell flat for me. This kind of humor can be hilarious in the right hands, but here the overt self-consciousness of it made it unfunny.