Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell

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It's 1808 and that Corsican upstart Napoleon is battering the English army and navy. Enter Mr. Norrell, a fusty but ambitious scholar from the Yorkshire countryside and the first practical magician in hundreds of years. What better way to demonstrate his revival of British magic than to change the course of the Napoleonic wars? Susanna Clarke's ingenious first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, has the cleverness and lightness of touch of the Harry Potter series, but is less a fairy tale of good versus evil than a fantastic comedy of manners, complete with elaborate false footnotes, occasional period spellings, and a dense, lively mythology teeming beneath the narrative. Mr. Norrell moves to London to establish his influence in government circles, devising such powerful illusions as an 11-day blockade of French ports by English ships fabricated from rainwater. But however skillful his magic, his vanity provides an Achilles heel, and the differing ambitions of his more glamorous apprentice, Jonathan Strange, threaten to topple all that Mr. Norrell has achieved. A sparkling debut from Susanna Clarke--and it's not all fairy dust. --Regina Marler


From Publishers Weekly
The drawing room social comedies of early 19th-century Britain are infused with the powerful forces of English folklore and fantasy in this extraordinary novel of two magicians who attempt to restore English magic in the age of Napoleon. In Clarke's world, gentlemen scholars pore over the magical history of England, which is dominated by the Raven King, a human who mastered magic from the lands of faerie. The study is purely theoretical until Mr. Norrell, a reclusive, mistrustful bookworm, reveals that he is capable of producing magic and becomes the toast of London society, while an impetuous young aristocrat named Jonathan Strange tumbles into the practice, too, and finds himself quickly mastering it. Though irritated by the reticent Norrell, Strange becomes the magician's first pupil, and the British government is soon using their skills. Mr. Strange serves under Wellington in the Napoleonic Wars (in a series of wonderful historical scenes), but afterward the younger magician finds himself unable to accept Norrell's restrictive views of magic's proper place and sets out to create a new age of magic by himself. Clarke manages to portray magic as both a believably complex and tedious labor, and an eerie world of signs and wonders where every object may have secret meaning. London politics and talking stones are portrayed with equal realism and seem indisputably part of the same England, as signs indicate that the Raven King may return. The chock-full, old-fashioned narrative (supplemented with deft footnotes to fill in the ignorant reader on incidents in magical history) may seem a bit stiff and mannered at first, but immersion in the mesmerizing story reveals its intimacy, humor and insight, and will enchant readers of fantasy and literary fiction alike. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From School Library Journal
Adult/High School - This delightful first novel exerts a strong and seductive pull on readers who might otherwise balk at its length. Like Philip Pullman's work, it is dark, deep, and challenging. It compares dead-on with Jane Austen's novels, and YAs who have underappreciated her wit may find it delicious when applied to magicians. Clarke even tosses in a bit of Dickens and Hardy - with great characterization, subplots, and a sense of fate bearing down hard on us. At stake is the future of English magic, which has nearly dwindled to all theory by the early 1800s, after centuries of prominence. When the book opens, only the reclusive and jealous Gilbert Norrell is practicing. Enter Jonathan Strange, a natural who has never studied magic formally. Norrell resents, then adopts Strange as a pupil whose growth he insists on controlling until the two come to the impasse that nearly leads them to destroy one another. Strange champions the 12th century's "Raven King" as the greatest magician in English history and hopes to summon him from Faerie, an alternate world. Norrell is determined to erase both from English memory - to hide the fact that he himself made a bargain with a fairy that has cost three people their lives, though their hearts go on dismally beating. Expertly written and imagined, the book is a feast for fans of fantasy, historical novels, or simply fabulously engrossing reads. - Emily Lloyd, formerly at Rehoboth Beach Public Library, DE Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From AudioFile
In 1806, Mr. Norrell, a plodding pedant, claims to be the last magician (wizard) in England. To prove it, he animates gargoyles and promises to help defeat Napoleon's forces. Jonathan Strange, an up-and-coming magician and the antithesis of Norrell, becomes his pupil. Their friendship and fantastical exploits make up much of the rest of the book. Oxford-educated Susanna Clarke invents a magical nineteenth-century England, replete with the dark, musty smell of old libraries and the stuffy diction of pedagogues. Narrator Simon Prebble creates an impressive gallery of personalities, each distinctive, each believable. Yet even with Prebble's outstanding performance, listening proves difficult. Clarke's copious "faux scholarly" footnotes force Prebble to interrupt often enough that the narrative flow suffers. This is probably best listened to with text in hand. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
*Starred Review* It's surprising that this first novel works at all. Readers have to accept an especially fanciful premise but, as it quickly becomes obvious, acceptance presents no difficulty. This novel took 10 years to research and write, according to publicity material; for readers at least, the author's arduous task results in a smashing success--it's an exceptionally compelling, brilliantly creative, and historically fine-tuned piece of work. The brilliance of the novel lies in how Clarke so completely and believably creates a world within a world: the "outside" world being early-nineteenth-century England, as Napoleon the eagle looms over all of Europe; the "inner" world being the community of English magicians. At the story's outset, magic in the land is moribund; magicians, who convene in various convocations, "did not want to see magic done; they only wished to read about it in books." But circumstances arise that cause magic again to become manifest, not simply discussed as an academic subject; this resurrection has extensive consequences for the heretofore stately state of magic in the English realm. History and fantasy form a beautiful partnership in this detailed, authentic, and heartfelt novel, which is part fairy tale and part epic. The inner world it creates is completely furnished and credible; the outside world is exact in its accuracy. Written in a style correlative to the writing and speaking of the time, which the reader will come to find quite mellifluous, this novel is, in a word, charming. Comparisons to Harry Potter are inevitable but not distracting, for this novel stands on its own. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Charles Palliser
"Absolutely compelling...the author captures the period and its literary conventtions with complete conviction. An astonishing achievement."


Review
"Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is unquestionably the finest English novel of thee fantastic written in the last seventy years."


Book Description
English magicians were once the wonder of the known world, with fairy servants at their beck and call; they could command winds, mountains, and woods. But by the early 1800s they have long since lost the ability to perform magic. They can only write long, dull papers about it, while fairy servants are nothing but a fading memory.
But at Hurtfew Abbey in Yorkshire, the rich, reclusive Mr Norrell has assembled a wonderful library of lost and forgotten books from England's magical past and regained some of the powers of England's magicians. He goes to London and raises a beautiful young woman from the dead. Soon he is lending his help to the government in the war against Napoleon Bonaparte, creating ghostly fleets of rain-ships to confuse and alarm the French.
All goes well until a rival magician appears. Jonathan Strange is handsome, charming, and talkative-the very opposite of Mr Norrell. Strange thinks nothing of enduring the rigors of campaigning with Wellington's army and doing magic on battlefields. Astonished to find another practicing magician, Mr Norrell accepts Strange as a pupil. But it soon becomes clear that their ideas of what English magic ought to be are very different. For Mr Norrell, their power is something to be cautiously controlled, while Jonathan Strange will always be attracted to the wildest, most perilous forms of magic. He becomes fascinated by the ancient, shadowy figure of the Raven King, a child taken by fairies who became king of both England and Faerie, and the most legendary magician of all. Eventually Strange's heedless pursuit of long-forgotten magic threatens to destroy not only his partnership with Norrell, but everything that he holds dear.
Sophisticated, witty, and ingeniously convincing, Susanna Clarke's magisterial novel weaves magic into a flawlessly detailed vision of historical England. She has created a world so thoroughly enchanting that eight hundred pages leave readers longing for more.



About the Author
Susanna Clarke lives in Cambridge, England. This is her first book.



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Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is absolutely compelling- I could not stop reading until I finished it. The author captures the period and its literary conventions with complete conviction. I was fascinated by the mixture of historical realism and utterly fantastic events: I almost began to believe that there really was a tradition of 'English magic' that I had not heard about. It's an astonishing achievement. I can't think of anything that is remotely like it.
author of The Quincunx  — Charles Palliser


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