Top Five Reasons Why I Love Susanna Clarke's First Novel

At 1000 pages, lesser men might baulk at Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - the so-called Harry Potter For Grown-Ups. I started it in November, finished it at 0100 this morning and I miss it already.



"Can a magician kill a man by magic?" Lord Wellington asked Strange.

Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. "I suppose a magician might," he admitted, "but a gentleman never could."

5. Hyper-Dickens
If you're going to write a 19th Century English novel these days, you'd better be prepared to sweat over each page. It's my (limited) understanding that Dickens and Austen wrote in the language of their time so it doesn't surprise me that it took Susanna Clarke ten years - outside of her day job - to achieve the same effect. Harley Street is Harley-street, choose is chuse, show is shew consistently throughout. Characters use exclamation points at the drop if a hat! The result is the difference between going to Venice and staying at The Venetian in Las Vegas: the copy is more concentrated.

4. Footnotes
Norrell makes a wild claim about the magicians of the past and the bottom of the page tells you that, actually, he's mistaken about that. Strange mentions a spell in passing and your eyes go down to see when it was published, how many copies still exist and the life and times of the author. Alternatively you get whole passages that have no place in the main narrative - free short stories, in essence. Footnotes give what you're reading an air of authenticity, authority and importance.

3. Structure
Does it surprise you to hear that Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell has a third section named after someone else entirely? The great thing about imposing a rigid structure early on is ignoring it and throwing the reader for a loop every hundred pages or so.

2. The Gentleman With The Thistle-down Hair
A wicked, wicked man from Faerie. I'd guessed the mystery involving him by page 600 and I like books that make me feel clever. Was it obvious to you too? It was certainly RIGHT.

1. Humour

"My chief problem," explained Lord Castlereagh, "is finding men for the Army - a quite impossible task, I assure you. But I have my eye on Lincolnshire; I am told that the pigs in Lincolnshire are particularly fine and by eating them the population becomes stout and strong. Now what would suit me best would be a general spell cast over Lincolnshire so that three or four thousand young men would all at once be filled with a lively desire to become soldiers and fight the French. Would your friend know of such a spell, Sir Walter, do you think?"

On the book's website Neil Gaiman says he thinks it's better than Tolkien. (Check out The Duke Of Wellington Misplaces His Horse too.) Are you reading it yet? Why not? And what should I read next?