For the past couple of days I’ve been reading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, and damn, it kicks ass. You can see that she spent ten years writing this: every sentence is so finely honed that the words dance and do pirouettes in your mind. The plot and the setting are intricate and sprawling. There are footnotes which are stories in themselves. There is wonderful, Austenesque Englishness. And then there is magic, and Faerie, the true meat of the book. In spite of the wry humor and a couple of laugh-out-loud moments, the supernatural elements have a sense of danger, and wonder.
It’s really quite a remarkable work, and I’m almost willing to agree with Neil Gaiman who described it as one of the most important English fantasy novels ever. (He is often misquoted in reviews about this - he really meant to emphasize the word English.) I’ll reserve judgement until I’m finished, but so far I’m enjoying it tremendously. Fortunately, it’s a pretty hefty tome, clocking in around 800 pages.
Salon has a pretty good review, check it out.
Did you know that it is only the first in a series, possibly a trilogy but I can’t remember exactly.
I’m viewing your site in Firefox and this comment box runs into your blogroll by a couple of cm.s Everything else looks great though. That image at the top is great.
Yeah, it’s pretty obvious that the plot is not going to be resolved in one book…
You’re right about the comment box, it’s a bit annoying. I’ll fix it when I have some geeking time.