Review of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

Susanna Clarke´s huge first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, astounds with its sheer originality, tremendous pacing and brilliant attention to detail. Its greatest merit lies, however, not in the author´s ability to bring the past to the reader but to transport the reader into the past and keep him or her there for the duration. The novel juggles a convincing 19th century England with its magical counterpart, with characters moving between the two worlds, sometimes, but not always, by choice. The reader, however, undergoes the same experience willingly, as if spellbound by the very magic that is the subject of the novel...

The novel opens in 1806 in an England exhausted by the war with Napoleon´s France. The golden and silver ages of magic are long gone: magic has become an academic subject now only studied by ´gentleman magicians´ - ´who had never harmed anyone by magic – nor ever done any one the slightest good.´ Only one practical magician remains, the suspicious, mean-minded recluse, Mr Norell, who is piqued into a display of his abilities by the challenge of a group of scholars. Fêted in London society but ignored by the Government to whom he wishes to lend his services, he sees his opportunity when the young wife of an influential Government Minister dies. Secretly conjuring help from other worlds to bring her back to life, he sets unpredictable and malevolent forces in motion.

Strange, his young assistant, is everything that Norrell is not – daring, impatient, imaginative and brilliant. He soon outstrips his master and when the conflict between them becomes a struggle for the future of magic itself, all bets are off.

¨Unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years. It´s funny, moving, scary, otherworldly, practical and magical, a journey through light and shadow – a delight to read¨ Neil Gaiman