FANTASY
Mystical ecosystem
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`Alienated from our natural surroundings, one can see why modern readers are bewitched by the idea of a golden age... '
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HAILED as a "Harry Potter for grown-ups", longlisted for the Booker, and shortlisted for the Whitbread Award for first novel, Susanna Clarke's huge book comes trailing clouds of glory. Set in the first two decades of the 19th Century, the story centres around the fortunes and misfortunes of England's only practising magicians, the eponymous Messrs. Strange and Norrell.
Appropriately enough, for such a bookish book, the story begins — and ends — in a library. The library belongs to Mr. Norrell, and is as dusty and mysterious as its owner. Here, Mr. Norrell sits poring over his rare collection, hoarding his knowledge and secretly perfecting his mastery of the magic arts. He is goaded out of solitude by the disbelieving scholars of the York Society of Magicians, whose maxim is that "a gentleman might study the history of magic (nothing could be nobler) but he could not do it." By bringing to life the stone figures of York Cathedral, Norrell demonstrates not only that magic is alive and well in England, but that a gentleman may be a scholar and magician both.
A historiography of magic
Norrell's fame and influence soon spreads, and before long he is hobnobbing with the London gentry and being courted to use his powers in the war against Napoleon. By chance, his path crosses with Jonathan Strange, a young man as flamboyant as Norrell is pedantic, whose magical abilities owe more to his natural aptitude than to years of hard study. When Norrell agrees to take on Strange as his pupil, these unlikely partners change the world: soldiers are brought back from the dead; ghostly ships terrorise the Spanish coastline; mirrors become doorways to new lands; and dark, mysterious forests exist where none should be.
According to Clarke's historiography, English magic has evolved through three phases: the "aureate" or Golden Age (up to the mid-16th Century) when magicians regularly journeyed to Faerie or "Otherland", and the greatest of them all, John Uskglass, popularly known as The Raven King, ruled most of Northern Britain; followed by the Silver Age when "Argentine" magicians wrote copiously about magic, but scarcely did any at all; to the early 19th Century, by which time the practice of magic had fallen into complete decline, and "magicians" were really scholars who spent their lives in academic dispute over the history of magic long dead.
This is all highly plausible. Clarke's fictional history mirrors Keith Thomas's factual analysis in his seminal book Religion and the Decline of Magic, in which he charts the pagan roots of English culture from the Middle Ages to the Reformation. Indeed, Clarke's book reads almost like Thomas's literary twin — both are copiously footnoted, both are over 700 pages long, and both describe a world in which humanity's perpetual attempts to understand (and thereby control) the world around them is governed by rules very different from, but no less coherent than, our own.
Making magic real
Like her literary heroes C.S. Lewis and Ursula K. LeGuin, Clarke's success lies in her creating a world that is plausible and coherent, both in its historical accuracy — like a good costume drama — and its epistemology. According to the author, "you make magic real by making it a little prosaic, a little difficult and disappointing — never quite as glamorous as the other characters imagine." Or, as one of the characters says: "Magic! Do not speak to me of magic! It is just like everything else, full of setbacks and disappointments."
The story is as much a novel of Regency social mores as it is a book about magic. At the start, the power struggle is between Mr. Norrell and those "academic magicians" for whom books are the be-all and end-all of magic, and anyone actually doing "magic" must be a charlatan, a lower-class street magician skilled in duping the uneducated masses. As a scholar and practising magician, Norrell has a foot in both camps, but when he takes on Jonathan Strange as his pupil he soon discovers — to his cost — that the knowledge that he has so carefully hoarded soon spirals out of his control.
It is no coincidence that scholarship and magic go hand in hand. Books about magic and books of magic are dangerous things. As he grows away from his master's teachings and discovers new and reckless paths of his own, Strange's greatest transgression is to write and publish a series of volumes. His History and Practice of English Magic (1840) lays out for the reading public the complete history of English magic, "a precise understanding of its nature, and ... the foundation for its future practice" — a dangerously democratic gesture wresting magic from its confines to the elite few and throwing it open to the masses.
Fairies are tough
The fairies in Jonathan Strange are a far cry from the diminutive, butterfly-winged creatures of the Victorian imagination. Clarke's fairies hearken back to Anglo-Saxon beliefs that they are "a feckless improvident race", malignant and capricious. When Mr. Norrell is tricked into a bargain with one such creature, his plight immediately recalls Faust and Dr. Frankenstein as he struggles to control the forces he has unleashed.
All this is about as far from chocolate frogs and jolly games of Quidditch as it's possible to get. With its all-pervasive aura of gloom, Jonathan Strange owes more to Lemony Snickett than J.K. Rowling, but perhaps it is no coincidence that the British reading public are so taken with tales of magic these days. Alienated from our natural surroundings, one can see why modern readers are bewitched by the idea of a "golden age" where trees, streams, the very rocks speak a language which we have forgotten. To enter the world of Norrell and Strange is to rediscover this mystical ecosystem of which we humans are just a part.
ANITA ROY
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke, Bloomsbury.
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