This time last year, I disappeared from my blog for a month, then came back having read a huge Victorianesque doorstopper and fallen completely in love with it. Well, it has happened again. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell isn’t quite a Possession-level love (and it is, technically, Regency rather than Victorian), but it is very much up my street. It’s over a thousand pages long, so I cannot possibly review it in a sufficient amount of detail. Here is a very inadequate summary. The year is 1806. Mr Norrell, sitting alone in his well-supplied library in Yorkshire, might be England’s last practical magician. The study of magic in England – previously known for her extraordinary magicians, most notably the Raven King of the North – has become an historical, theoretical exercise for eccentric gentleman. At least, it is until Mr Norrell decides to step forward out of the shadows, offering his aid to defeat Napoleon. A grateful nation allows him increasing latitude to dictate everything about the study and practice of magic in the country, until an arrogant, brilliant young man called Jonathan Strange shows his hand. Each determined to have his own way, the battle between the two magicians will end up overshadowing even war with France…

This is such a wonderful book, and a big part of that is the fact that it is obviously a love letter to the writers of the Regency and early-mid Victorian period. Clarke is writing what she loves and having a tremendous time doing it. The best way I can think to explain what I mean is with a contrast. During my break, I read the first section of Zadie Smith’s The Fraud. I didn’t know when I first picked it up, but Smith has written in the past about her contempt for historical fiction, most people who write it, and almost everyone who reads it. She then decided to have a bash at writing a historical novel anyway, as literary authors who loudly despise genre fiction so often do. The resultant book was a complete failure as a piece of historical fiction (and you had best believe I will be writing a post about that reading experience once I’ve thought about it some more). After abandoning The Fraud about a third of the way in, it was such a joy to pick this up and spend time with an author who is a) taking this seriously as a creative, artistic, innovative endeavour, and b) entirely respecting the conventions of historical fiction, even as she upends them over and over. This is the more impressive since this is a novel populated with fairies and magicians and alternate history. It would have been easy to throw style and tone out of the window, but Clarke sticks to the constraints she’d set for herself, and the novel is the better for it.

In the quotes on the back of my edition, Neil Gaiman calls Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell the finest English novel of the fantastic to have been published in the last seventy years. At first I considered this a very silly remark to have made in 2004, when Lord of the Rings was only fifty years old. However, I suppose it’s possible to argue that this is a novel of the fantastic in a way that Lord of the Rings isn’t – there, the whole story takes place on a canvas that is fantastic, but the story is not about that; here, the canvas is much more familiar territory, and the fantastic is being imposed upon it. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is very much about the way that magic informs and transforms English society, and the way England in turn informs and transforms magic. (I keep saying English, because this novel is mostly about England. The Scots are fighting Napoleon right alongside the English, of course, but there is much suspicion among the English due to lingering memories of the Auld Alliance. Wales doesn’t get a look-in until much later in the book, and to talk about it would constitute something of a spoiler).

It is also very funny. You see the influence of Tolkien on this book all over the place, but especially in the nature of the jokes. There are many occasions where Clarke suddenly switches registers, or entirely subverts both the characters and the readers’ expectations about where or when something is happening, rendering everything that precedes it funny in retrospect. Take this example, where Stephen Black – a butler who is under the enchantment of “the gentleman with the thistledown hair” – is led deeper and deeper into faerie lands far away from his own home. They have to acquire some mystical, powerful object for a piece of obscure dark magic, so the place they are heading must be the most frightening and enchanted of the lot:

When he awoke it was dawn. Or something like dawn. The light was watery, dim and incomparably sad. Vast, grey, gloomy hills rose up all around them and in between the hills there was a wide expanse of black bog. Stephen had never seen a landscape so calculated to reduce the onlooker to utter despair in an instant.

“This is one of your kingdoms, I suppose, sir?” he said.

“My kingdoms?” exclaimed the gentleman in surprize. “Oh no! This is Scotland!”

With apologies to Scotland, of course. Scotland is one of the most beautiful countries I’ve ever been to, but I think even the most ardent patriot would admit that it’s not at its best in mid-December. Anyway, that’s not why it’s funny. Every part of the book that made me laugh relied on about a hundred other pages that went before it – this is the closest I could get to a joke that happens over the course of a few lines. Nonetheless it is much funnier if you’ve previously been led, along with Stephen into Lost-hope and the King’s Roads and all sorts of other faerie kingdoms, only to find that the one time you’re pretty sure you know where you are is the time you are most wrong.

I’ve heard a lot of people say they bounced off this book in the first hundred pages. It’s definitely not for everyone. Clarke has come as close as I think anybody could to writing a fantasy novel in a Regency voice. It’s incredibly old-fashioned: a giant doorstopper, with countless footnotes about academic histories of magic, and a talkative narrator who is happy to zip between as many perspectives as the book has characters. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is a love letter to many authors, but notably Austen, Tolkien, and Trollope. (In fact, there are vague allusions to the events of Lord of the Rings having happened millenia ago, much as another author might have incorporated some of the Arthurian legends). The sustained authenticity of her tone also means, for example, that an English butler, Stephen, is frequently referred to as “a negro servant”, although much less when we are in his perspective (generally when he is thinking about himself through other people’s eyes). The thing is, the perception of Stephen by other characters is vital to his arc. I could make the case that he is the most interesting character in the novel, and certainly he has the most compelling storyline of almost every character – yet if he isn’t being seen as “a negro servant” by most of the characters, most of the time, then his decisions and his conclusion make much less sense (and are less narratively satisfying).

I can see that for some people, either the length of the book or this use of language – along with some of the perspectives around gender roles and class in the book – would be an immediate no for a novel written in the 21st century. I feel differently, though. Stephen’s character is such an great exploration of the hypocrisies and tensions in English (and, more widely, British) society during this period. That’s clearly a theme Clarke is preoccupied with, not just in the treatment of Stephen but also Mr Norrel’s working-class, intelligent but uneducated servant Childermass. You start this book thinking it will be about Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, both well-off landowners, but it will be Childermass and Stephen Black who stay with you when you close the book.

Clarke’s novel is, in essence, an origin story for the Victorian imperialism that was (as in real life) born out of the Napoleonic Wars – it’s just that her version happens to include magic. Because her two most interesting characters are servants, one working class and the other black, Clarke is making it crystal clear what the British Empire owed to men who were consistently overlooked and disregarded by it. Yet, somehow, she does all of this without coming across as preachy. Even as she’s showing the roots of Victorian imperialism and making it clear that it’s not heading anywhere good, she is also obviously writing as someone who loves Britain, especially England, and especially the Yorkshire countryside that is so integral to the novel. Pulling this off strikes me as a very impressive artistic achievement (and not, Zadie Smith, staid and conservative. Thank you very much and good day to you).

This review is getting to be almost as long as the novel itself, so I had better sign off. The target audience for a thousand-page monster of a novel, with a slow start, roughly a billion characters, and a carefully aped Regency/early Victorian writing style is not – I am aware – huge. Add in fantasy tropes and battling magicians, and it shrinks further. However, if you think you would like something in this vein, I think Clarke has done as wonderful a job as any author could – so if you are part of that target audience, I recommend this very highly indeed!