Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is the debut novel by British writer Susanna Clarke. Published in 2004, it is an alternative history set in 19th-century England around the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Its premise is that magic once existed in England and has returned with two men: Gilbert Norrell and Jonathan Strange. Centred on the relationship between these two men, the novel investigates the nature of "Englishness" and the boundaries between reason and unreason, Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Dane, and Northern and Southern English cultural tropes. It has been described as a fantasy novel, an alternative history, and a historical novel.
The narrative draws on various Romantic literary traditions, such as the comedy of manners, the Gothic tale, and the Byronic hero. The novel's language is a pastiche of 19th-century writing styles, such as those of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.
Clarke began writing Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell in 1992; ten years later she submitted the manuscript for publication. It was accepted by Bloomsbury and published in September 2004, with illustrations by Portia Rosenberg. The novel was well received by critics and reached number three on the New York Times Best Seller list. It was longlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize and won the 2005 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
Plot summary
Volume I: Mr Norrell
The novel opens in 1806 in northern England with The Learned Society of York Magicians, whose members are "theoretical magicians" who study magical texts and history, after the decline of magic in England several hundred years earlier. The group is stunned to learn of a "practical magician", Mr Gilbert Norrell. Norrell proves his skill as a magician by making the statues in York Cathedral<!-- The novel specifies cathedral, noting that the building is both a minster and a cathedral --> speak, thereafter compelling the society to disband. John Childermass, Mr Norrell's factotum, convinces a member of the group, John Segundus, to write about the event for the London newspapers.
Segundus's article generates interest in Mr Norrell, who moves to London to revive practical English magic. He enters society with the help of two gentlemen about town, the superficial and foppish Christopher Drawlight and the shrewd Henry Lascelles, and meets a Cabinet Minister, Sir Walter Pole. To ingratiate himself, Mr Norrell attempts to resurrect Sir Walter's fiancée, Emma Wintertowne, from the dead. He summons a fairy — "the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair" She had also recently re-read J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and afterwards was inspired to "trying writing a novel of magic and fantasy".
After she returned from Spain in 1993, Clarke began to think seriously about writing her novel. She signed up for a five-day fantasy and science-fiction writing workshop, co-taught by writers Colin Greenland and Geoff Ryman. The students were expected to prepare a short story before attending, but Clarke only had "bundles" of material for her novel. From this she extracted "The Ladies of Grace Adieu", a story about three women secretly practising magic who are discovered by the famous Jonathan Strange. Greenland was so impressed with the story that, without Clarke's knowledge, he sent an excerpt to his friend, the fantasy writer Neil Gaiman. Gaiman later said, "It was terrifying from my point of view to read this first short story that had so much assurance ... It was like watching someone sit down to play the piano for the first time and she plays a sonata."
Clarke spent the next ten years working on the novel in her spare time, while editing cookbooks full-time for Simon & Schuster in Cambridge. She also published stories in Starlight 2 and Starlight 3; according to the New York Times Magazine, her work was known and appreciated by a small group of fantasy fans and critics on the internet.
Around 2001, Clarke "had begun to despair", and started looking for someone to help her finish and sell the book. Bloomsbury were so sure the novel would be a success that they offered Clarke a £1 million advance. They printed 250,000 hardcover copies simultaneously in the United States, Britain, and Germany. Seventeen translations were begun before the first English publication was released. and in other countries on 4 October.|alt=Line-drawing of the man with thistle-down hair leaning over a woman lying in a bed with his hands upraised.]]
Clarke's style has frequently been described as a pastiche, particularly of nineteenth-century British writers such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and George Meredith. Specifically, the novel's minor characters, including sycophants, rakes, and the Duke of Wellington, evoke Dickens' caricatures. Laura Miller, in her review for Salon, suggests that the novel is "about a certain literary voice, the eminently civilized voice of early 19th-century social comedy", exemplified by the works of Austen. as well as the free indirect speech made famous by Austen. For example, Clarke mentions Jonathan Strange on the first page of the novel, but only in a footnote. He reappears in other footnotes throughout the opening but does not appear as a character in the text proper until a quarter of the way through the novel. Gregory Maguire notes in The New York Times that Clarke even gently ridicules the genre of the novel itself: "[A gentleman] picks up a book and begins to read ... but he is not attending to what he reads and he has got to Page 22 before he discovers it is a novel—the sort of work which above all others he most despises—and he puts it down in disgust." Elsewhere, the narrator remarks, "Dear Emma does not waste her energies upon novels like other young women."
Clarke's style extends to the novel's 185 footnotes, which document a meticulous invented history of English magic. At times, the footnotes dominate entire pages of the novel. Michael Dirda, in his review for The Washington Post, describes these notes as "dazzling feats of imaginative scholarship", in which the anonymous narrator "provides elaborate mini-essays, relating anecdotes from the lives of semi-legendary magicians, describing strange books and their contents, speculating upon the early years and later fate of the Raven King". This extensive extra-textual apparatus is reminiscent of postmodernist works, such as David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996) and Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (1997), particularly as Clarke's notes humorously refer to previous notes in the novel. Clarke did not expect her publisher to accept the footnotes. According to Nisi Shawl in her review for The Seattle Times, the illustrations reinforce this tenor: "Shadows fill the illustrations by Portia Rosenberg, as apt as Edward Gorey's for Dickens' Bleak House." Author John Clute disagrees, arguing that they are "astonishingly inappropriate" to the tone of the novel. Noting that Clarke refers to important nineteenth-century illustrators George Cruikshank and Thomas Rowlandson, whose works are "line-dominated, intricate, scabrous, cartoon-like, savage and funny", he is disappointed with the "soft and wooden" illustrations provided by Rosenberg. In an interview, Clarke describes how she creates this realist fantasy: "One way of grounding the magic is by putting in lots of stuff about street lamps, carriages and how difficult it is to get good servants." This realism has led other reviewers, such as Polly Shulman, to argue that Clarke's book is more of an historical fiction, akin to the works of Patrick O'Brian. As she explains, "Both Clarke's and O'Brian's stories are about a complicated relationship between two men bound together by their profession; both are set during the Napoleonic wars; and they share a dry, melancholy wit and unconventional narrative shape." Clarke combines these Romantic genres with modern ones, such as the fantasy novel, drawing on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, Philip Pullman, T. H. White, and C. S. Lewis. As Maguire notes, Clarke includes rings of power and books of spells that originate in these authors' works. Although many reviewers compare Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell to the Harry Potter series, Annie Linskey contends in The Baltimore Sun that "the allusion is misleading": unlike J. K. Rowling's novels, Clarke's is morally ambiguous, with its complex plot and dark characters.
Themes
Friendship
Reviewers focus most frequently on the dynamic between Norrell and Strange, arguing that the novel is about their relationship. The two are a "study in contrasts", with Norrell "exceptionally learned but shy and fussy" while Strange is "charming, young, fashionable and romantic". Lady Pole, who is taken away into the fairyland of Lost-Hope every night, appears insane to those around her. She is hidden away, like the character type examined by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their seminal book The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Developing a "divided consciousness", she is passive and quiet at home, but at the same time is vengeful and murderous in the fairy land. In particular, "it's the sort of Englishness which is stuffy but fundamentally benevolent, and fundamentally very responsible about the rest of the world", which connects Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes to Clarke's Jonathan Strange. Both Strange and Norrell suppress the voices of these groups in their rise to power. Mr Norrell, for example, attempts to buy up all the books of magic in England to keep anyone else from acquiring their knowledge. He also barters away half of Emma Wintertowne's (Lady Pole's) life for political influence, a deal about which, due to an enchantment, she cannot speak coherently. Their campaign included plans for newspaper serialisations, book deliveries by horse and carriage, and the placement of "themed teasers", such as period stationery and mock newspapers, in United States coffeeshops.
The book made its debut at No. 9 on the New York Times Best Seller list, rising to No. 3 two weeks later. Four weeks after the book's initial publication, it was in Amazon's top ten. Endorsements from independent booksellers helped the book sell out its first printing;
The New Republic hailed it as "an exceptional work", both "thoughtful and irrepressibly imaginative". and the Denver Post called her a "superb storyteller". The reviews praised Clarke's "deft" handling of the pastiche of styles, but many criticised the novel's pace, The Guardian complaining that "the plot creaks frightfully in many places and the pace dawdles". Clute writes that "a more cautious claim" would be: "if Susanna Clarke finishes the story she has hardly begun in Strange ... she may well have then written the finest English novel of the fantastic about the myth of England and the myth of the fantastic and the marriage of the two ever published, bar none of the above, including Mirrlees."
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|Man Booker Prize
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|Whitbread First Novel Award
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|Times Best Novel of the Year
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|British Book Awards Literary Fiction Award
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|British Book Awards Newcomer of the Year Award
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|Hugo Award for Best Novel
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|Locus Award for Best First Novel
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|Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature
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|Nebula Award for Best Novel
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|World Fantasy Award for Best Novel
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Adaptations and sequel
Film
On 15 October 2004, New Line Cinema announced that it had bought a three-year option on the film rights to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Clarke received an undisclosed "seven-figure sum", making the deal "one of the biggest acquisitions of film rights for a book in recent years". New Line chose Christopher Hampton, whose adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons won an Academy Award, to write it; New Line executives Mark Ordesky and Ileen Maisel were overseeing the production. On 7 November 2005, The Daily Telegraph reported that Hampton had finished the first draft: "As you can imagine, it took a fair amount of time to work out some way to encapsulate that enormous book in a film of sensible length ... [b]ut it was lots of fun—and very unlike anything I have ever done before." At that time, no director or cast had yet been chosen. Julian Fellowes then took over writing duties before the collapse of New Line Cinema.
Television
Pre-production of a seven-part adaptation of the book began in April 2013, with filming later in the year, including locations in England, primarily in Yorkshire, as well as in Canada and Croatia.
The miniseries began broadcast on BBC One on Sunday 17 May 2015. The book was adapted by Peter Harness, directed by Toby Haynes, starring Bertie Carvel and Eddie Marsan as the titular magicians, and was produced by Cuba Pictures and Feel Films.
Audio book
The 32-hour audio book of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was released by Audio Renaissance in 2004. According to a review in The Boston Globe, reader Simon Prebble "navigates this production with much assuredness and an array of accents. ... Prebble's full voice is altered to a delicate softness for young ladies of a certain breeding, or tightened to convey the snarkiness often heard in the costive Norrell." Prebble interrupts the main text to read the footnotes, announcing them with the word footnote. According to the AudioFile review, the "narrative flow suffers" because of these interruptions and the reviewer recommends listening "with text in hand". that progress on the book had been slowed by her ill health. In 2006 it was reported that she suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome, although she has since received a wide assortment of diagnoses. The sequel, she said, is "a long way off":
Notes
References
External links
- The Library at Hurtfew, a Jonathan Strange wiki