The Spirit of English Magic
Posted 05 Oct, 2004 at 16:50 by matt in /Books | Permanent link
Last week I gave a talk to the undergraduate math club here, and was rewarded with a gift certificate to Borders. So last night I go to take advantage if it, and happened upon a novel that I've heard good things about: Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Between the gift card and the discount coupon I had, the book was more or less free, so I figured why not?
So far it's a lovely read. I've got something of a weakness for pastiches of
nineteenth-century English literature -- as readers of my other blog have seen --
so I was predisposed to like this book. If I had to choose a single adjective
to describe the work, I'd pick meticulous
; Ms. Clarke is engaged in
writing a totally fictitious history, complete with footnotes and references
to other (nonexistent) works, and her attention to detail in this endeavour
is astounding.
Like Steven Brust's Phoenix Guards books and Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events, the narrator is as much a party of the story as any of the characters, while not actually being part of the action. The witty comments about the characters and the action, dropped blandly into the narrative flow... the underlying assumption that much of what we're reading about, say, the Raven King (a magician who ruled northern England for three hundred years) is well-known fact, taught in schools... to me, these little touches are nearly worth the price of admission all by themselves.