Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell

 

With September here now, we can spy on the horizon Susanna Clarke's new novel, Piranesi, to arrive in bookstores in a fortnight. The novel before that, Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell, published sixteen years ago in 2004 was also a long time in the making, begun in 1993 (my dissertation took twelve years: these long-gestating opuses are dear to my heart). 

So with the new novel - no sequel but an entirely new work - so close to us now, perhaps a few words about JSMN would not come amiss. 

Many of you will be familiar with the tale of the two magicians loosing the chaoes of ancient magic upon the  ultra-civilized England of the Napoleonic wars. The novel was long listed, short listed and outright won an impressive number of prizes, such as the Hugo, the Mythopoeic, and the World Fantasy and remains in my heart  as perhaps my favorite of any novel of this century or the last. 

One of its distinguishing features was a use of footnotes that recall Borges but are entirely the author's own. They refer to (among other things such as Neapolitan dialects of Hell and fairy shepherds) such "facts" of the novel as this magic that once but no longer (until the present of the novel) did efficaciously exist, as an English tradition. These footnotes do so by referring to history lessons that the reader will surely recall from their own childhood, thus implicating us in the mythos of the book so well that we almost do recall lessons from the schoolroom in which we recall vaguely these tales of the Raven King.

Another distinguishing feature is the highly Austenian voice of the narrator whose diction has the cut glass precision of its model for couching these baroque and fantastical goings on. Jane Austen was not a Brontë, she did not go in for flights of fancy - her world was anchored in the very real of the everyday, the concrete and she is an excellent and piercing observer of that world. And so to take that eye and voice and use it to describe, for just one instance, the statues of York cathedral coming to life to tell their stories and what they have witnessed over the centuries is a magnificently effective trouvaille of storytelling.

For me the novel was a reflection on history and memory, both as a kind of de facto magic. The use of footnotes that gather us into the reality of the story and bring us to remember things we couldn't possibly remember, and therefore participate in the novel's world, in which the use and control of magic is a daily rediscovery, is an example of that. We wonder what else we may have forgotten or half forgotten from the days of our childhood learning when magic - to some at least- was an everyday concern, as it is for small children. Further to that, the magicians conjure the dead to learn their secrets, which is an idea I hold close to my heart the historian as necromancer.

Another aspect that I particularly loved was that the narrator of a man's world seems very much herself to be female. And the predicament of women in the early nineteenth century is brought to bear, with one fairy-napped victim being consigned to a madhouse. Moreover those who have been taken by the fairies for their dreary infliction of dancing the nights away with no rest for human bones: the description of the effect upon the victim is, for those who know, unmistakeably that of depression. One of those victims is the son of a slave-woman, a man of color who is one of the most sympathetic character's Clarke has created. So the dispossessed and the disinherited are certainly not forgotten or relegated to a sideplot. Their stories are integral to the novel's dénouement.

The delights of Ms. Clarke's poetic imagination cannot be set out in a few examples, try though I might, to choose (or "chuse" as her narrator would say). I would like for instance to integrate an essay on her use of the magic inscribed on the very landscape with Simon Schama's brilliant study, Landscape and Memory but it is beyond the confines of this present small effort. Perhaps I will succeed in a further entry.

For now I will at least set forth these lines that, however unsatisfactorily, attempt to tell of the spell cast by this novel as we await the arrival of the new. 

(This is the front cover art for the book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. The book cover art copyright is believed to belong to the publisher or the cover artist. This is the front book cover art (black version) from the first hardcover edition of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. The book cover art copyright is believed to belong to the publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing, or the cover artist.)