Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell

Information and Book Review

Current TurboBookSnob Ranking: 3

Susanna Clarke

Ms. Clarke was born in Nottingham, England, and now lives in Cambridge with her partner, the novelist and reviewer Colin Greenland.  After graduating from Oxford, she worked in non-fiction publishing and taught English in Turin and Bilbao.  Jonathan Strange is her first full-length novel.

Susanna Clarke's debut novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, is widely purported to be the publishing event of 2004. 

Its publishers certainly must be feeling confident about how well it will sell. When the TurboBookSnob went to the bookstore to purchase it, she noticed that it was the only book she has ever purchased that was completely sealed.  A casual browser could only be persuaded by the jacket art and the two glowing references printed on the back cover.  In the TurboBookSnob's mind, this behavior suggests that the publishers are relying on readers to seek out this book.  Readers browsing a bookstore in search of a new and interesting title usually have a tactile need to read the synopsis on the inside cover or page through the book at random to get a sense of its contents and the author's writing style.  It will be interesting to see if this book does as well as this tactic suggests.

Don't be fooled by reports that Jonathan Strange is merely "Harry Potter for adults."  That label does not even begin to describe this extraordinary piece of work, which was ten years in the making.

This novel begins in 1806.  While England is busy fighting the war with Napoleon, in Yorkshire, a society of magicians meets regularly to study the art of magic which has not been practiced in England in many hundreds of years. 

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"A great old church in the depths of winter is a discouraging place at the best of times; the cold of a hundred winters seems to have been preserved in its stones and to seep out of them.  In the cold, dank, twilight interior of the Cathedral the gentlemen of the York society were obliged to stand and wait to be astonished, without any assurance that the surprize when it came would be a pleasant one.

Mr Honeyfoot tried to smile cheerfully at his companions, but for a gentleman so practised in the art of a friendly smile it was a very poor attempt.

Upon the instant bells began to toll.  Now these were nothing more than the bells of St Michael-le-Belfrey telling the half hour, but inside the Cathedral they had an odd, far-away sound like the bells of another country.  It was not at all a cheerful sound.  The gentlemen of the York society knew very well how bells often went with magic and in particular with the magic of those unearthly beings, fairies; they knew how, in the old days, silvery bells would often sound just as some Englishman or Englishwoman of particular virtue or beauty was about to be stolen away by fairies to live in strange, ghostly lands for ever.  Even the Raven King - who was not a fairy, but an Englishman - had a somewhat regrettable habit of abducting men and women and taking them to live with him in his castle in the Other Lands [see footnote].  Now, had you and I the power to seize by magic any human being that took our fancy and the power to keep that person by our side through all eternity, and had we all the world to chuse from, then I dare say our choice might fall on someone a little more captivating than a member of the Learned Society of York Magicians, but this comforting thought did not occur to the gentlemen inside York Cathedral and several of them began to wonder how angry Dr Foxcastle's letter had made Mr Norrell and they began to be seriously frightened.

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Go to footnote for selected quote.

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