By making her magicians insensitive clods who continually miss the point, Clarke caricatures the hubris of the English gentlemen who led the Industrial Revolution with their “magical” inventions, gaily mechanizing society out of all recognition without thinking too much about its less salutary aspects-like, say, the colonization of half the world. These are people and events whom the clever magicians consider unimportant, so it takes them most of the novel to figure it out.įar from exulting in England’s imperial past, therefore, Strange & Norrell turns it inside out. But in the fullness of time (the novel is 800 pages long) the most important subplot turns out to be about a malevolent fairy who wreaks havoc when nobody’s looking, bewitching several women and a Black footman named Stephen. Though Strange and Norrell are scholars, they enjoy plenty of macho glory when they assist Wellington in the Napoleonic wars by causing, among other phenomena, ghostly angels to brandish spears at the enemy. Lewis, who were both professors of medieval English literature, Strange & Norrell is rooted in the canon of Arthurian myth, which gives the reader the odd sensation of rediscovering something old rather than consuming something new. In Clarke’s parallel England, sorcery was common in the medieval period, when a mysterious King Arthur–like figure called the Raven King ruled the north for several centuries before disappearing. Writing in the simultaneously sharp yet mannered style of Austen or Thackeray-even using vintage spellings like “chuse” for choose and “shew” for show-Clarke decorates her England with satirical scenes from parlors to Parliament. Norrell is a masterpiece of literary homage and subversion. From within the universe she constructed decades ago in her first writings, Clarke has taken the toughest problem of her own creation-what to do with all the otherworldly architecture she’s made possible-and turned it into an opportunity to explore the effects of trauma and dissociation on memory and identity. Having gone from the hustle and bustle of publishing a hit to living in seclusion, she has written a dreamlike follow-up to her busy, involved debut. After very dark years in the late 2000s, and extensive therapies, Clarke has now finished Piranesi, a novel whose title keen readers will recognize from her first book and which picks up the loose ends left in Strange & Norrell’s world.Ĭlarke’s two legends are beginning to merge into one. Ever since, she’s been affected by a difficult-to-diagnose fatigue syndrome causing migraines, exhaustion, and photosensitivity. Now Clarke has explained the reason: 15 years ago, she fell down for no good reason. She published The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories in 2006, a collection of tales expanding upon the original piece that caused Greenland to pick up the telephone, but that was it. Norrell universe but concerns the lives of Regency lady magicians.Ĭlarke exploded into literary celebrity, then vanished. She showed them a story called “The Ladies of Grace Adieu,” which takes place within the Jonathan Strange & Mr. in 1993, she took a short writing workshop with the fantasy and sci-fi writers Colin Greenland and Geoff Ryman. In a 2004 interview with The New York Times Magazine, Clarke recalled that she was teaching in Bilbao, Spain, when she had “a kind of waking dream” about a man who had “been dabbling in magic, and something had gone badly wrong.” After returning to the U.K. This first, fictional legend gave rise to a second, true one: the unlikely story of how Clarke came to write it at all. The eponymous Strange and Norrell are gentleman scholars (and rivals) who restore the lost art of practical magic to early nineteenth-century England, only to find that they have unleashed forces beyond their control. Norrell, her 2004 debut novel, Clarke created an alternative England where magicians conjure warships out of the rain and walk through mirrors. Susanna Clarke is the author of two literary legends.
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