Hostage Freed: Harry Potter for Adults?
Have you ever taken so long to read a book that you were afraid to finish it?
Having just completed a 2 month, on-again-off-again affair with Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, I feel a touch of Stockholm Syndrome. I was not sad when I hit the last page, but I did feel that this regular companion was going to be missed. The book has a very consistent quality to the writing, which is a faux-period style and is composed of many rather short chapters, each a sort of vignette that has a small point of its own to consider as well as advancing the greater plot.
Briefly, it is the story of England's Greatest Magician, Gilbert Norrell, who is a mousy, reclusive, socially inept and naive fellow who has, at the turn of the 19th century, deeply studied magic and magical history in an age when England has all but been abandoned by such forces. He is eventually joined by a newcomer to Magic, the eccentric dilettante, Jonathan Strange, who is himself a wealthy Gentleman of Society. The book encompasses their relationship from a happy beginning, and their collaboration with the British government against the upstart dictator Napoleon Buonaparte, to a terrible-cum-indifferent end. The two men have such disparate characters that they cannot help but come to odds about the future, and indeed the past, of English Magic. Norrell wants to revive it under strict, one might say neurotic, constraints, while Strange is far more outgoing and experimental, and therefore dangerous, than his Pupilmaster.
In the background there is a rich alternative history about the former greatness of English Magic, as cultivated and harnessed by the fabled Raven King of the middle ages, who ruled England, via his great Magic gleaned from a youth spent as a slave to Faeries, from his stronghold in Newcastle and held the North of England particularly in a thrall which permeates the Northern psyche to the present day of the story.
The first strange thing, for me, is that I completed the book at all; that I stuck with it when the story doesn't really get going until you are over 200 pages into it. What compelled me to stick with it when I am not really very into fantasy stories about magic and faeries? I suppose it was the historical venue and it's conceits. The elaborately detailed background, or at least its intimations via often extensive footnoting of the history, is a small joy to behold; it lends itself very well to verisimilitude and is cohesive to the greater plot.
I have no difficulty imagining this book as a film directed by Terry Gilliam, and starring Ian Holm as the beady-eyed bewildered Norrell, and Paul McGann as the ironic Jonathan Strange. Norrell's servant, Childermass, I can see being played by any of a number of familiar British character actors with beaky noses and creasy faces. Of course, to be filmed, the plot would have to be pared down quite a bit, and might suffer from the lack of the historical firmament of the footnotes, but a clever scriptwriter could no doubt cobble something respectable out of the source material without unduly compromising the integrity of the fantasy elements.
As with my ambivalence about finishing the book, I cannot unreservedly recommend it, unless one is a voracious reader with a good deal of patience. The reward of this book is it's overall quality of tone and subtlety of characterization (which might at first seem to be parody or pantomimetic, but is really very elegant), as well as the depth of care given to the construction of this alternative history where the powers of Faerie, a borderland world to our own, may constantly threaten our neat pretense of rationality.
This is no simplistic faery story, nor is it a dire, heavy-handed horror story, but rather a very finely conceived and crafted work of literature which owes as much to classical English literature as it does to a very modern sense of irony.
Having just completed a 2 month, on-again-off-again affair with Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, I feel a touch of Stockholm Syndrome. I was not sad when I hit the last page, but I did feel that this regular companion was going to be missed. The book has a very consistent quality to the writing, which is a faux-period style and is composed of many rather short chapters, each a sort of vignette that has a small point of its own to consider as well as advancing the greater plot.
Briefly, it is the story of England's Greatest Magician, Gilbert Norrell, who is a mousy, reclusive, socially inept and naive fellow who has, at the turn of the 19th century, deeply studied magic and magical history in an age when England has all but been abandoned by such forces. He is eventually joined by a newcomer to Magic, the eccentric dilettante, Jonathan Strange, who is himself a wealthy Gentleman of Society. The book encompasses their relationship from a happy beginning, and their collaboration with the British government against the upstart dictator Napoleon Buonaparte, to a terrible-cum-indifferent end. The two men have such disparate characters that they cannot help but come to odds about the future, and indeed the past, of English Magic. Norrell wants to revive it under strict, one might say neurotic, constraints, while Strange is far more outgoing and experimental, and therefore dangerous, than his Pupilmaster.
In the background there is a rich alternative history about the former greatness of English Magic, as cultivated and harnessed by the fabled Raven King of the middle ages, who ruled England, via his great Magic gleaned from a youth spent as a slave to Faeries, from his stronghold in Newcastle and held the North of England particularly in a thrall which permeates the Northern psyche to the present day of the story.
The first strange thing, for me, is that I completed the book at all; that I stuck with it when the story doesn't really get going until you are over 200 pages into it. What compelled me to stick with it when I am not really very into fantasy stories about magic and faeries? I suppose it was the historical venue and it's conceits. The elaborately detailed background, or at least its intimations via often extensive footnoting of the history, is a small joy to behold; it lends itself very well to verisimilitude and is cohesive to the greater plot.
I have no difficulty imagining this book as a film directed by Terry Gilliam, and starring Ian Holm as the beady-eyed bewildered Norrell, and Paul McGann as the ironic Jonathan Strange. Norrell's servant, Childermass, I can see being played by any of a number of familiar British character actors with beaky noses and creasy faces. Of course, to be filmed, the plot would have to be pared down quite a bit, and might suffer from the lack of the historical firmament of the footnotes, but a clever scriptwriter could no doubt cobble something respectable out of the source material without unduly compromising the integrity of the fantasy elements.
As with my ambivalence about finishing the book, I cannot unreservedly recommend it, unless one is a voracious reader with a good deal of patience. The reward of this book is it's overall quality of tone and subtlety of characterization (which might at first seem to be parody or pantomimetic, but is really very elegant), as well as the depth of care given to the construction of this alternative history where the powers of Faerie, a borderland world to our own, may constantly threaten our neat pretense of rationality.
This is no simplistic faery story, nor is it a dire, heavy-handed horror story, but rather a very finely conceived and crafted work of literature which owes as much to classical English literature as it does to a very modern sense of irony.