Presto!

For various reasons, I haven't been to any book club meetings. But I finally read one of the books! It felt a little like cramming for a class discussion, rushing to read 850 pages before tonight's book club meeting. (So book club peeps, stop reading if you want.)

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is about two magicians who bring back magic to England. Norrell creates a magical monopoly, becomes Strange's tutor. Strange helps Britain conquer Napoleon with magic. Norrell and Strange quarrel about the future of magic. Meanwhile, there are sinister things happening in the fairy world.
Norrell wants to hoard knowledge, keep it elitist, control it, and regulate it; Strange wants to share the magical love.

I found it fascinating how Susanna Clarke basically rewrote British history, but kept some parts. She invented an entirely new Northern England kingdom that was half faerie, but incorporated it into the general (real) history of England. She even wrote the book as if it were a quasi-history, complete with annotations and footnotes. I got bored by the accounts of the war in Spain. But I loved how she incorporated Lord Byron into the plot (ah, middle school memories.)

Towards the end I got irritated by the two magicians. Right in front of them are two women and a black servant who are under a fairy's spell, but they're both so caught up in their own field of study and in determining the history and future of magic in England that they don't recognize its presence in their everyday lives. So they ignore these marginalized people. It was a realistic attitude for the time, I know. It was just a little painful to read.

The character descriptions are brilliant; Clarke writes with great wit. What I thought the characters lacked was development. The story takes place between 1806 and 1816, and though the characters experience a lot of world-shattering changes, I didn't get the impression that they were changed. At least, their actions didn't really reflect that. It seemed they were all somehow part of a great and ancient prophecy, and that development's narrative took precedence over their individual psyches.

And then the ending. I irrationally shed a few tears! It could have been because my eyes were already stinging and blurred from reading the book in the wee hours of the night, in dim lighting. But I was also not expecting such a dismal ending.

In all, it's a dark tale. Overly long in the telling, perhaps, but overall clever and well-written.