Friday, August 26, 2011

Poor Lady Pole

While Labor Day is the real end of summer, today feels like the end.  (By the way, I have no patience for people who insist that Summer runs from June 21 through September 21.  Summer runs from Memorial Day Weekend through Labor Day Weekend.   No rational person disputes that fact.)  Students start arriving on campus next week.  It’ll be nice to see them. 

However, one problem with the end of summer is the list of things I meant to do this summer but haven’t yet done.  Starting with this here blog.  I have ten books sitting on my desk awaiting reviews.  So, while I try to have a nice clean desk at the start of the semester, I am going to fail this year with these books sitting here unreviewed.

The preceding does explain the book choice for today’s review:  I am picking the thickest one to make the stack noticeably smaller.

Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a Book Most Curious.  I spent a good chunk of the time reading it trying to figure out an author with which to compare this book.  It finally hit me:  Anthony Trollope.  It is a Victorian novel (oddly, since it was published in 2004 and takes place between 1806 and 1817, so it shouldn’t be a Victorian novel, but it is) about the whole of English Society from the highest (the King) to the lowest (rural servants), but most of the action centers on High Society.  The Napoleonic Wars play a part, and both Wellington and  Byron show up for a bit.  And right now, you, Dear Reader, are imagining a novel which is not at all like the one being discussed.

You see, this is a novel about Magic.  It has magicians and fairies.  And once again, you, Dear Reader, are imagining a novel completely unlike the one written. 

But, imagine Trollope writing a novel in which there is magic and fairies, and you get something close—even though until I read this book, I would have thought the very idea of that combination was preposterous.

The novel has an interesting conceit:  Magic is real, but nobody in England in the early 19th century remembers how to do magic.  It has become a Lost Art.  It is rediscovered by Norrell and Strange.  The novel is all about the effects of their rediscovery. 

It is a brilliantly structured novel.  The novel never once feels like a fantasy novel; it reads like historical fiction.  You can almost believe it is Straight History.  The book is littered with scholarly footnotes, explaining references made by the characters—and said footnotes come complete with full bibliographic citations—and all of this, the reference and the citations, are completely made up.  The Reader is simply assumed to have heard all about the Raven King, for example; before starting the novel, the reader is presumed to know about his 300 year reign as the great Magician-King, with Kingdoms in three different worlds.  Assorted footnotes throughout give you bits and pieces of trivia you didn’t know about him.  By the end of the book, it seems as if you have in fact heard of the Raven King many times, probably reading about him in one of those children’s books all about him.  It’s really quite brilliant, and the sure sign of a confident novelist.

Yet, for all its structural brilliance, the novel was plodding.  I enjoyed the whole thing; I can easily imagine reading it again with great pleasure.  I suspect its craft improves on the second read.  Yet, there was very little forward momentum in the book.  It just moseyed along for the first 700 pages before getting to a point where the plot sped up.  This thus became one of those books I enjoyed reading, but after any particular chapter it was easy to put down and I never felt any particular hurry to get back to it.  Yet, when I picked it up again, I was immediately interested, and read with pleasure.

Is it a book to be recommended?  Yes, but only to the type of person who is going to just read it no matter how slowly it moves.  I suspect its natural audience is people who like both High Literature and Fantasy novels.  Neil Gaiman has a cover blurb for it, but I am not sure it has the same appeal as Gaiman—it isn’t nearly as Fantastical as Gaiman.  The reader from whom I would very much like to hear is someone who likes Trollope, but not fantasy novels.  Would the magic of the book be enticing or just silly to such a reader?  Sadly, I doubt I will ever find out; as soon as said reader sees the book is about magicians, the experiment will die.

The other thing about the book which arouses my curiosity:  will this book become Great?  It was recommended to me by someone during a conversation about the possible Greatness of Harry Potter.  I can see why.  This book too might be a Great Book.  Right now, I don’t think it is, but I would have to reread it in a few years to be sure about that. And that means I have another problem: Do I shelve this book with my Low Fiction or my High Fiction? 

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