Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke - a Book Review

When Magicians Collide

Susanna Clarke's 782-page debut novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, sounded like it would be right up my ally, dealing with magicians in England as it does. At first I was put off quite a bit by the small print, which I found quite hard to read and focus on for any length of time. This made the first half of the book very slow going as she builds her characters. By the middle, however, I was hooked and each page made the book harder and harder to put down. By the end, my initial ugh and feelings of being tortured paid off, and paid off well.

The story is of two magicians. Mr. Norrell wants to bring English magic back into vogue, but he wants to make sure that he is the one in charge of it all and goes about foiling all the other petty magicians of the time. That is to say, if you read books about magic, you called yourself a magician even if you'd never actually cast a spell. Norrell is actually performing magic and set about getting rid of any possible competition... until Jonathan Strange appears on the scene.

Norrell takes Strange in as a student, and pretty much as his best friend. Things happen and the two come to theoretical differences and part ways over it... becoming seemingly bitter enemies. This is where the book starts taking off and sucked me in. Clarke is very good at descriptive prose and had me visualizing everything that was happening with no effort on my part:

Something was standing in the centre of Venice. It could be best described as a black tower of impossible vastness. The base of it seemed to cover several acres. It rose up out of the city into the sky and the top of it could not be seen. From a distance its colour was uniformly black and its texture smooth. But there were moments when it seemed almost translucent, as if it were made of black smoke. One caught glimpses of buildings behind - or possibly even within - it

There are ink drawings by Portia Rosenberg at various intervals, but they didn't quite agree with my own visuals so I didn't pay them much never-mind. For you, they may enhance the experience, they did nothing for me.