Boston Review Books

JenniferHoward

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Susanna Clarke
Bloomsbury, $27.95 (cloth)

8 Parlous times like these ought to be kind to literature, especially the escapist variety. We can all be forgiven for feeling a little nervous, not only about the external threats to our persons and our way of life but about the measures being taken to preserve them. When the news strays so far from the familiar moral contours of the struggle between Good and Evil, it’s tempting to lose ourselves in stories in which this battle is fought in clear terms and on an epic scale.

Goodover here, Evil over there—call it the Lord of the Rings model, inwhich heroes may be flawed but are always recognizably heroes, andtheir enemies want nothing less than to stamp out (as one of the goodguys puts it in Peter Jackson’s recent film adaptation) “allthat’s green and good in this world.” Many other fantasy classicswork this territory, too; think of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles ofNarnia, for instance, with its underpinning of Christianallegory.

At the movies, heroic fantasy rules. The blockbusterbudgets and box-office success of the three Lord of the Ringsinstallments—The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers(2002), and The Return of the King (2003)—suggest how hungrycontemporary audiences are for Good vs. Evil drama on the grand oldepic scale.

Meanwhile, on the literary front, writers notknown as fantasists have been raiding the arsenal of fantasy andscience-fiction writers for weapons. Maybe the times are just toostrange for realism. In his latest novel, The Plot Against America,Philip Roth uses the kind of what-if fantasy a science-fiction writermight deploy—Charles Lindbergh, running for president on anisolationist platform, defeats FDR in the election of 1940—tocomment on these days of homeland security and the Ashcroftization ofour civil liberties.

Like most former refuges in the modernworld, fantasy literature no longer offers a secure retreat. Nor doesit offer a reliable moral proxy for real-world troubles. The fightbetween Good and Evil increasingly resembles our own tangled innerconflicts; the battle for Middle Earth has become a struggle forself-knowledge. Conviction has vanished, and only its epic trappingsremain.

The same process appears to be taking place in the HarryPotter series. With each new installment, J.K. Rowling brings heryoung hero a step closer to Lord Voldemort, the maleficent wizardwith whom Harry has an increasingly sinister connection. In the firstbook, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1997), the orphanedHarry discovers not only that he is a wizard but that as an infant hesurvived Voldemort’s attempt to murder him. The attack killedHarry’s parents and left him with a scar shaped like a lightningbolt on his forehead—an indelible link to Voldemort. By book five,Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003), Harry has learnedof a prophecy that seems to connect him with his nemesis: “And theDark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the DarkLord knows not . . . and either must die at the hand of the other forneither can live while the other survives.”

Readers of Tolkienwill note the phrase “the Dark Lord” and think of Sauron, theprime mover behind the evil that threatens Middle Earth. But so farin the series Rowling hasn’t made explicit the threat Voldemortpresents; mostly he seems to exist to menace Harry and those close tohim. Ordinary evildoers, even bumbling bureaucrats like Minister ofMagic Cornelius Fudge, present a more immediate danger—and one towhich contemporary audiences can immediatelyrespond.

Self-knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Rowling, alongwith Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who plays Harry in the movieversions of the story, has hinted that Harry may not survive the lastinstallment. Like the world these books supposedly help us leavebehind, the selves they explore look more and more treacherous, evenworld-shattering.

In another, far more sophisticated recent exampleof epic fantasy, self-knowledge can determine not only the fate ofits possessor but of the universe itself. The British fantasy writerPhilip Pullman uses Milton’s Paradise Lost as the starting pointfor the His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, The SubtleKnife, and The Amber Spyglass). Billed as young-adult fare, His DarkMaterials has a thematic agenda that reaches far beyond itsadvertised audience. Pullman’s theological and philosophical gambitinvolves nothing less than an assault on institutional religion andthe traditional hierarchy of Good (God) and Evil (Lucifer). Thisstory of interstitial universes and the rending of the fabric betweenthem draws on many things, including the study of elementaryparticles (classified as a branch of theology in this world, andtangled up with a mysterious substance known as Dust), and likeLucifer it wants to storm the very gates of Heaven and toss God outon his ear.

But this sophisticated thematic structure hangs on onesmall person: Lyra Belacqua, an orphan growing up half-savage amongthe scholars of Jordan College, in an Oxford very similar to and verydifferent from the one we know. The embodiment of free will (or itsillusion), she is destined to bring about the end ofdestiny. But she must do so without knowing what she is doing, as ifit were her nature and not her destiny to do it. If she’s told whatshe must do, it will all fail; death will sweep through all theworlds; it will be the triumph of despair, forever. The universeswill all become nothing more than interlocking machines, blind andempty of thought, feeling, life.

Lyra mustn’t know, inother words, that she is a hero. Compare her situation to Frodo’sin The Lord of the Rings, where the drama hangs on whether he will beable to carry out the mission—destroying Sauron’s great ring ofpower—that he chooses to undertake of his own free will early inthe novels.

Pullman and Rowling have, in very differentways, taken the old Tolkien model of epic heroism and turned it in onitself. Great battles may still take place (and Pullman especiallydoes not stint on them), but the most significant, those on which thefate of everything and everyone depends, are fought within. HarryPotter may be his own worst enemy. This is fantasy for today’sworld; the moral battlefield has moved inward.

What, then, to makeof this year’s fantasy blockbuster, Jonathan Strange & Mr.Norrell, by the English writer Susanna Clarke? A tale of magic andpolitics set in the England of the Napoleonic Wars, this debut novelhas been touted by its publisher, Bloomsbury, and by reviewers in theUnited States and Britain as Harry Potter for grown-ups. Ten years inthe writing and nearly 800 pages long, Jonathan Strange & Mr.Norrell looks like the sort of book one ought to be able to disappearinto for weeks. But in Clarke’s hands the genre has taken a furtherstep from classic fantasy, one that lands it a possibly fatal degreeof academic remove away from epic sweep and the big moral questions.To read it is to wonder whether fantasy still has a life of itsown.

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From the very first lines of Jonathan Strange & Mr.Norrell, one understands that something has gone wrong in the worldof fantasy:Some years ago there was in the city of York asociety of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of everymonth and read each other long, dull papers upon the history ofEnglish magic. They were gentleman-magicians, which is tosay they had never harmed any one by magic—nor ever done any onethe slightest good. In fact, to own the truth, not one of thesemagicians had ever cast the smallest spell, nor by magic caused oneleaf to tremble upon a tree, made one mote of dust to alter itscourse or changed a single hair upon any one’shead.

Clarke’s wry, serio-comic tone makes plain thefirst, and possibly most profound, of the author’s influences: notMilton or Tolkien or Rowling or Pullman but Jane Austen, whoseventures into fantasy extended only as far as Northanger Abbey,itself a satire of what reading Gothic novels does to young ladies’powers of rational thought. This is the first indication of many thatJonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell will turn out to be fantasy not asalternate moral battlefield or magical transport but as . . .literary history.

Like an Austen narrator, Clarke’s neveridentifies him- or herself. From the 185 footnotes that begin on pageone and interrupt the text throughout—some take up more space thanthe main text above them—it seems the authorial voice belongs to ahistorian rather than a storyteller. The notes, and their compiler,never let you forget that you’re reading a book. Welcome to theland of the ivory-tower fairy tale, a place you may long strayforlorn in search of adventure or a way out.

According toClarke’s recasting of English history, magic was once as common inEngland as breathing, way back in the medieval Golden Age of JohnUskglass, also called the Raven King—part Arthur, part Merlin, partTam Lin from the old British ballad. Like Tam Lin, Uskglass wasstolen as a child and raised in the land of Faerie. Unlike Tam Lin,though, he learned during his captivity how to practice magic andcame back to the human world with a fairy army, which helped himestablish a 300-year reign in the north of England. A more benigncousin of Sauron or Lord Voldemort, Uskglass shadows every action inthe novel.

By the autumn of 1806, when the action of JonathanStrange & Mr. Norrell begins, Uskglass has faded into distantmemory. The only magicians left in England are “theoretical”ones, among them the hapless scholars described in the book’sopening lines. They study magic and write treatises and quarrel, asscholars will, but none of them can cast a spell to save hislife.

Meanwhile the nation is in crisis: Napoleon has overrun theContinent and thrown Whitehall into a tizzy. (Clarke’s descriptionsof ministerial squabbling depict the Cabinet not as statesmen at atime of national crisis but only a bunch of fussy old birds.) Just astroubling—for the magicians, anyway—is the discovery that most ofthe useful books of magic have been bought up by a sour littlecountry squire named Gilbert Norrell.

Given his monkishpredilection for study, it’s no surprise to learn that Norrell is abachelor. With his manor house, independent income, and hot and coldrunning servants, he could have wandered out of Pride and Prejudice,except that he has figured out how to do actual magic—thespell-casting, weather-controlling, fairy-conjuring,bringing-back-people-from-the-dead kind. Having given Norrell aspectacular chance to display his skills—he brings the stones andstatues of York Minster to life, and they tell ancient stories ofmurder and outrage—Clarke sends the magician to London withambitions to take his place on the national stage and to effect therestoration of English magic.

But don’t expect to be carried offinto the wild fantastic yonder by Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,even though Clarke works in a nod to almost every conceivable elementof British fantasy. These include the requisite dark lord—thatwould be the aforementioned John Uskglass, the black-haired RavenKing—who is kin not only to Sauron and Voldemort but also to mucholder characters from British folklore, such as Arawn, the ruler ofthe underworld in the ancient Welsh epic The Mabinogion. There’s acursed and Tolkien-esque Black Tower, too, although Clarke’shappens to be made of Eternal Night.

The novel also features fairyrevels, enchanted human captives who must be rescued from Faerie,“a dark, tangled wood under starlight,” trees and stones thatcome alive, mirrors used as doorways, references to rings of power,mad old women in attics, the madness of King George, logs turned intothe Anglo-Saxon equivalent of golems, a book written on a man’sskin, a vagabond street magician who carries a powerful prophecy . .. and on and on.

So many riches, so many opportunities to astonishus, and yet Clarke insists on breaking off again and again to indulgein literary pastiche. So we get lackeys with Dickensian names likeDrawlight and Childermass, literary squabbles and dust-ups that playout in the pages of the famous 19th-century literary journal TheEdinburgh Review, that wicked Lord Byron and his shenanigans, genteelEnglish travelers sojourning Wings of the Dove–like in Venice, andso forth. (And don’t forget the footnotes.) When Norrell attendshis first fashionable soiree, he enters a scene that can’t decidewhether it wants to be Pride and Prejudice or VanityFair:On his arrival at Mrs Godesdone’s house Mr Norrellfound himself instantly plunged into the midst of a hundred or so ofMrs Godesdone’s most intimate friends. . . . And how to describe aLondon party? Candles in lustres of cut-glass are placed everywhereabout the house in dazzling profusion; elegant mirrors triple andquadruple the light until night outshines day; many-coloured hothousefruits are piled up in stately pyramids upon white-clothed tables;divine creatures, resplendent with jewels, go about the room inpairs, arm in arm, admired by all who see them. Yet the heat isover-powering, the pressure and noise almost as bad; there is nowhereto sit and scarce anywhere to stand. . . . Your only wish is topreserve your favourite gown from the worst ravages of thecrowd.

When a real fairy enters the story, summoned byNorrell to help with a tricky bit of black magic that is essential tothe magician’s ambitions, he could be another London swell: “atall, handsome person with pale, perfect skin and an immense amountof hair, as pale and shining as thistle-down. . . . He was dressedexactly like any other gentleman, except that his coat was of thebrightest green imaginable—the colour of leaves in early summer.”Green, of course, has forest andpagan associations, and has long beenlinked to fairies and their realm; think of the old English folklorictradition of the wild woodland spirit known as the Green Man or the14th-century tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in which theArthurian hero meets up with a knight with otherworldly powers. InClarke, however, it speaks more to fairy fashion than toadventure.

The magic Norrell and the gentlemanundertake—bringing back the dead—should be a moment of highseriousness, if Clarke were following the conventions of epic fantasy. Instead she turns it into a moment of comic absurdityreminiscent of another recent fantasy series, Terry Pratchett’sDiscworld novels, which can be read as an extended joke at theexpense of fantasy traditions.

So the fairy interrupts the tediousLatin invocation Norrell uses to call him up: “ ‘Yes, yes!’cried the gentleman suddenly breaking into English. ‘You elected tosummon me because my genius for magic exceeds that of all the rest ofmy race. Because I have been the servant and confidential friend of[the Golden Age magicians] Thomas Godbless, Ralph Stokesey, MartinPale and of the Raven King. Because I am valorous, chivalrous,generous and as handsome as the day is long! That is all quiteunderstood! It would have been madness to summon anyoneelse!”

Which means that it was madness to summon him.Though comically presented, Norrell’s arrangement with the fairyturns out to be a sort of pact with the Devil, one of manyindications in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that magic is ascapricious and unpredictable as the humans and sprites wieldingit—again, no refuge. The gentleman with thistle-down hair spiritsaway humans he takes a fancy to and forces them to join the nightlyrevels—“long, empty celebrations of dust and nothingness”—atLost-hope, his palace in Faerie where the walls crumble and skeletonsin rusting armor fill the courtyards. Like English magicians, fairiesappear to have fallen on hard times, though Clarke never tells us howor why.

After spending so much time with an amoral fairy anda sour magician-scholar, one begins to despair of meeting with anyonewho resembles an old-fashioned hero. The promise of one arrives aftera hundred pages or so in the person of Jonathan Strange, who likeNorrell is an offshoot of the British landedgentry.

Although he turns out to be as naturally gifted amagician as Norrell is a book-learned one, Strange cuts a somewhatfeeble figure: “Though he had no striking vices, his virtues wereperhaps almost as hard to define. At the pleasure parties of Weymouthand in the drawing-rooms of Bath he was regularly declared to be‘the most charming man in the world’ by the fashionable people hemet there, but all that they meant by this was that he talked well,danced well, and hunted and gambled as much as a gentlemanshould.”

Will Jonathan Strange turn out to be Frodo of theShire, called out of his quiet country life to enact a greatdestiny—to become “the conduit through which all English magicflows,” as he puts it in a moment of grave crisis late in the book?First he has to be Darcy of Pride and Prejudice and Pip of GreatExpectations. He marries a woman of good humor and good sense, thenbecomes Norrell’s pupil in order to have access to the books ofmagic he needs. Tiring of the scholar’s life after a while, hejoins Wellington on his Continental campaigns as magician-de-camp(moving roads, rearranging the landscape, controlling theweather—that kind of thing).

Here Strange takes a steptoward more-recent British fictional creations: Bernard Cornwell’sRichard Sharpe, a British infantry officer who’s starred in anumber of Napoleonic War adventures (Sharpe’s Trafalgar, Sharpe’sWaterloo, Sharpe’s Rifles, and many others), and PatrickO’Brian’s British naval officer Jack Aubrey and his good friend,the doctor and British spy Stephen Maturin, who also feature in apopular series of historical novels (including Master andCommander).

Stuffed with such historical and magical baggage,Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell ought to be a vehicle to take oneon a journey through realms of wonder. Of the King’s Roads, Faeriehighways built long ago by John Uskglass the Raven King, Norrell saysthat they “lead everywhere. Heaven. Hell. The Houses of Parliament.. . . They were built by magic. Every mirror, every puddle, everyshadow in England is a gate to those roads.”

Every time Clarkecould take us down those roads or spirit us away to realms of Faerie,like Tam Lin in the old ballad, she chooses to double back to thelibrary. Even at the book’s final crisis, when Strange has broughtabout a feat of magic the likes of which hasn’t been seen since theRaven King’s reign, he and Norrell can only address the situationas rival scholars:“I like your labyrinth,” [Strange]said conversationally. ‘Did you use Hickman?’“What?No. De Chepe.”“De Chepe! Really.” For the first time Strangelooked directly at his master. “I had always supposed him to be avery minor scholar without an original thought in hishead.”“He was never much to the taste of people wholike the showier sorts of magic,” said Mr. Norrell, nervously,unsure how long this civil mood of Strange’s mightlast.

But aren’t the showier sorts of magic—magic thatbattles for the soul of the world—exactly what we need, now morethan ever? “There are people in this world,” says one of thefairy gentleman’s human favorites, “whose lives are nothing but aburden to them. A black veil stands between them and the world. Theyare entirely alone. They are like shadows in the night, shut off fromjoy and love and all gentle human emotions, unable even to givecomfort to each other. Their days are full of nothing but darkness,misery and solitude.”

This sounds very much like adescription not of enchantment but of clinical depression. ThroughoutJonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, wondrous if familiar conceitsfight to break through the tangles of literary reference Clarke hasplanted, yet she cannot, or will not, free her story from its manyprogenitors. Clarke’s novel doesn’t parody the genre; it displaysin a lifeless cabinet of wonders all its elements—every element,that is, but the epic sense of Good and Evil, of things larger thanourselves, that makes the best fantasy so powerful and sonecessary.

If a writer of epic fantasy isn’t willing to trust her imagination and her story—is afraid to let it matter—can a salve for the troubles that afflict us still be found in books? There was a time when one could turn to fantasy, if not for escape, then for a working-out, a cathartic reimagining, of the world’s crises. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell takes epic fantasy down a road that leads away from large moral conflict and instead doubles back on itself and the reader. There is no help and no escape for any of us in a story that can’t escape its own bookishness. <

Jennifer Howard is a contributing editor of The Washington Post Book World.

Originally published in the December 2004/January 2005 issue of Boston Review