In the throes of a migraine, I review Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell starts with a question: Why is magic no longer being done in England? You might expect that the book to spend it’s considerable heft dissecting this question (1), but instead it is answered almost immediately: Magic hasn’t gone anywhere, Susanna Clarke informs us. The king is awake in the mountain.
Written over a period of 10 years, Clarke’s debut work is a layercake of influences. She affects a dickensian, Austen-esque style, complete with archaic spellings and familiar archetypes of gentleman ne’er-do-wells, haughty scholars, candid soldiers, ladies, and aunts of ladies. Her fairies are from Gaiman (2): seemingly unpredictable, amoral and yet mirror images of English society. Her labyrinthine narrative is episodic, heavy with interludes. The titular magicians are orbited by dozens of characters whose lives were touched by magic. They are, by and large oblivious to this, as the omniscient, (and highly opinionated) narrator is quick to point out. Through these stories, Clarke interrogates aspects of English society such as class, race, and gender. Her lighthearted tone and meandering speed don’t undercut the strength of this commentary. She leads you on a journey that doubles back on itself to give new meaning to initially confusing episodes, and multiple page-long footnotes (3).
The England of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was once a magical kingdom, the Northern half of which was ruled by a mysterious, and seemingly immortal magician called the Raven King (4). He came out of Fairie as a teenager, and brought magic with him. He ruled for 300 years, then one day disappeared mysteriously, as magical kings are won’t to do. The use of magic declined after his disppearance, and by the time the book starts there are only theoretical magicians left in England. There is of course a prophecy, about two magicians who bring magic back to England. The central conflict is predicated on the differences between Mr Norrell (5), and his pupil Jonathan strange. Norrell is a recluse, a misanthrope obsessed with preventing anyone he views as an unworthy magician (read: everyone but himself). Strange is a jovial young man, much taken up with idle pursuits, but he proves singularly talented at magic once he takes it up (mostly due to random chance).
Yet the two men are more similar than they are different. Like most theoretical magicians, they are of the landed gentry who look upon those needing to work for a living with disdain. Norrell treats his servants, and those of the lower classes with outright contempt, yet he is completely dependent on them, lacking even the most basic social skills himself. Strange is kind to his servants, in an absent-minded way similar to how he treats his wife (more on that later), but he takes their services for granted (6) much like Norrell does. The prophecy speaks of two magicians, and it never occurs to them (nor their wealthy patrons) to regard anyone else as one. Their sense of superiority blinds them not just to the many lay-practitioners of magic they encounter, but to those subjected to magical violence.
Norrell, obsessed with reviving English magic, travels to London at the start of the book to introduce himself to high society. Desperate for the patronage of the politician Sir Walter Pole (7), he revives Sir Walter’s fianceé from the dead, with the help of a fairy gentleman with thistle-down hair. The gentleman demands half of Lady Pole’s life in return, so the poor woman is spirited away every night to his decrepit castle in Faerie (aptly named Lost-Hope) and made to dance incessantly. There is a black servant in the household of Sir Walter named Stephen Black, who encounters the gentleman with thistle-down hair by chance, and gets embroiled in the enchantment himself. The gentleman becomes obsessed with Stephen, bringing him gifts of immeasurable value and spiriting him away to strange places, eventually deciding to make Stephen King of England. Lady Pole and Stephen cannot tell anybody of their plight because the enchantment turns their begging for help into stories of fairies: An obvious metaphor for the way women and people of color are silenced by their opressors, this effect of the enchantment highlights the magicians’ ignorance and prejudice.
There is a particular way the story congeals around Stephen. A free man (as slavery is no longer legal on English soil) and a highly competent and eductated servant, Stephen has risen as high in English society as his race & birth allowed for. He identifies himself as English to the gentleman with thistle-down hair several times, though the gentleman insists the English ought to be his enemies. And while those around him treat him with respect (8), and he occupies a relative position of authority among his fellow servants, he is still very firmly othered. He maintains a forced air of respectability, and is careful not to associate himself with poor black people, so people respect him. The independently wealthy widow pursuing him romantically believes him to be a lost African prince, a belief shared by Stephen’s subordinates. This is how they can reconcile their racist preconceptions of black people with Stephens professional poise. This exoticizaton is just one of the ways English identity is denied to him. The enchantment creates a kind of invisible wall between Stephen and the rest of the world, a forced emotional detachment reinforced by his inability to ask for help. Stephen is forced to tiptoe around the temperamental gentleman, who is oblivious to the fact he treats Stephen the same way his white English masters do. When he discovers that Stephen’s mother was enslaved, and she died in childbirth before she could give Stephen a name in her own language, the gentleman vows to discover the name she imagined for Stephen in her mind but wasn’t able to utter before her death. The suggestion that he has a name truer than the one his mother’s slave master gave him, while alluring to Stephen, also works to further his despair because the gulf between him and Englishness grows further. England is the only home he is ever known but he can’t be an equal member of it’s deeply racist society. The gentleman with the thistle-down hair claims Stephen’s isolation is due to his “exceptional nobility” but being exceptional is something Stephen does everything in his power to avoid. Many people dismiss him, or outright ignore his presence, but this is preferable to the violent treatment he is sometimes subjected to. He dismisses the gentleman’s attempt to make him King as impossible; the English would never suffer a black man to rule over them.
Stephen’s negative identity is paralleled by the Raven King, called John Uskglass who identifies himself as a nameless slave. Having been abducted by fairies as a baby, he was raised in Faerie and taught magic there. He came back to England to conquer it as a teenager, claiming to be the son of a Norman aristocrat (the John Uskglass whose name he claimed as his own) who was owed land by the king, but this was an implausible story that Norrell calls into question. His origins are hazy and mysterious. That the most powerful magician in the history of England would refer to himself as a slave is very interesting (9). He learned magic from fairies, who were his allies during his reign as King of Northern England, but he was at one point in his life subservient to them. The character of the Raven King is always just beyond the reach of the narrative, only ever appearing in second-hand accounts and unreliable histories. The most concrete information about him seem to be the things he wasn’t. Yet this paralell to Stephen I find curiously lacking in a way that’s difficult to explain without spoiling the end of the book. Stephen’s story is that of powerlessness. He skirts the margins of society like John Uskglass skirts the margins of the book, but Usklgass is a powerful magician, someone whose lack of name and concrete identity affords power and safety from the prying eyes of history. Stephen is uniquely visible in a predominantly white society. The resolution of his story, and the way he gains power, while undeniably satisfying and a perfect mirror of Uskglass’ own journey, individualizes his struggle in a way. There are many women in this book experiencing patriarchal violence, many servants suffering under a rigid class system, yet there is only one Stephen (10).
Fairies, while they are openly distasteful of Christians (as they refer to all humans), play at a sort of warped, magnified version of high society. Lost-hope is littered with the decayed corpses of the gentleman’s enemies, and he often makes his court reenact his victories over them (11). This is interesting, when you contrast it with the military victories against Napoleon Strange & Norrell aid with their magic (12). The spells they employ are (somewhat heavy-handed) metaphor, starting with Norrell summoning an illusory English fleet that surrounds every European port, to Strange displacing entire cities and rivers (13) in Spain to suit the needs of the English army. The appearance of military power is important to English society, just as it is to the gentleman with the thistle-down hair. There is also a strong undercurrent of nostalgia, for a golden age of magic and violence. Norrell and Strange want to revive English magic through performing military feats. The gentleman remembers the times he crushed the skulls of his enemies fondly. Englishmen and fairies are united in their longing for a past when magicians curried the favour of powerful fairies. Curiously, the only exception to this is Norrell who for all his conservatism, hates fairies with a passion (14). It’s ironic that he is the only magician in the book to outright solicit the services of one. This anti-fairy agenda shows remarkable prescience on his part, something that he never exhibits otherwise. English magic comes from the Raven King, and by extension from the fairies who raised him, but the alliance between the two groups has always been uneasy. There is an undercurrent of indigeneity to the fairies, but I cannot say if it is intentional.
Stephen and Lady Pole eventually grow desperate enough to make an attempt of the life of Norrell, which they believe will break the enchantment over them.. Lady Pole fails to kill him however, as Norrell’s much maligned servant Childermass saves his life. Before, Lady Pole was considered an eccentric and a recluse- but after her attempt to kill the magician, everyone thinks her mad, and she is sent off to a madhouse managed by a former magician (coincidentally also someone Norrell has maligned) (15).In many ways Lady Pole is of a higher social standing than Stephen, being a white, upper-class woman, married to a high-ranking government official, and yet help is denied to her too. People dismiss her as ill, and eventually mad. Her only friend and visitor is Arabella Strange (wife of), who is endangered by this association; the fairy gentleman grows enamoured with her and whisks her away to Lost-hope too. This event is not without warning signs, yet Strange, distracted by the writing of his masterwork, doesn’t recognize the marks of fairy magic and believes his wife dead. Arabella’s apparent death marks a turning point in her husband’s life, spawning a newfound passion and focus that eventually leads him to previously unimagined magical heights, though the reader is left with the persistent impression that Strange is more attached to the memory of his wife than he ever was to the living woman.
Lady Pole, enchanted, is not mad, but in many ways madness is the key to magic. Or rather, the affected reason of the English magicians prevents them from understanding limiting the world by imposing sanity upon it. Mental illness being in some way key to, or indicative of magic is a very old and overused trope (16), but Clarke’s presentation of it is so delightful, I barely mind. It’s like this: Jonathan Strange is commissioned, by the royal spawn, to cure George III of his madness. Magic so far has had little medical application, but since it’s the princes asking, Strange obliges. The madness of the king is little explained, Clarke instead focuses on his mistreatment by his two doctors, a pair of brothers referred to as the Willises. You’ll need to excuse me for the insertion of an excerpt now: “It was not that the Willises were liked or respected – they were not. It was not that their treatments granted the King any relief from his torments – they did not. The secret of the Willises' success was that they were cool when everyone else was in a panic. They embraced a responsibility which everyone else was most anxious to avoid”. In practice, The Mad King of (Southern) England is a fairly jovial old man, isolated from his family and the outside world and administered “purging medicines” by the Willises, which have little effect. He can see the gentleman with the thistle-down hair, invisible to Strange, and holds a long conversation with him. This is what eventually sets Strange on the path to researching madness, but it takes him a long time, and he never quite arrives to the openness to magic the King naturally had.
The case of King George III is emblematic of the treatment of (the appearance of) mental illness in the book’s version of England. Lady Pole is held first cooped up in her own rooms, then a remote house in Yorkshire. Her husband scarcely mentions her condition, and she is forgotten by society at large. Norrell, who knows she is not mad, still treats her as such; he is made uncomfortable by her. The old lady who eventually teaches Strange the secret to madness is completely shunned by society; her only companions are cats. The idea of normalcy and sanity, upheld by society, actively oppresses instances of real magic, and obscures its workings even from its best-renouned scholars.
Strange posits the theory that madmen can confer with fairies because fairies themselves are mad; this is transparently untrue. If madness is a state of being open and ready to receive the world, the gentleman with the thistle-down hair is the sanest character in the book. His dogged narcissism makes him as blind to the actions of the magicians as they are to him. He dismisses them as rubes out of hand (which they are) and doesn’t even begin to consider that anyone else in England could be practicing magic. He’s too caught up in his glorious past.
The last stretch of the book is a delicious toppling of dominoes. Villains get their comeuppance in a dramatic, dickensian fashion, all set in a strikingly visual, bleak Yorkshire winter. The question at the start of the book gets answered again. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a gorgeous, unique book, and I can’t help thinking I’ve failed to adequately convey all its complexities here. Many thanks to my friend Lee for helping edit this review, and to my friend who lent me the book, and introduced me to the work of Clarke via Piranesi the year before. See you next time!
1 my copy (kindly lent to me by @exeterbook) clocks in at a whopping 1006 pages. i used it to press fabric.
3 sometimes she even cite’s her own footnotes
4 the hungarian version is simply titled the raven king, which almost certainly made the work of reviewing the book easier.
5 his first name is gilbert but this mercifully does not come up very often.
6 when he goes to aid the duke of wellington in portugal, he takes his servant jeremy johns with him. most of his subsequent complaints of discomfort he experienced in an active warzone are a bit ironic as a result
7 i’m going to be frank, i forgot what his job was and i can’t be arsed to page through the book to look it up.
8 clarke has a bit of a rosy view of how a black person in stephens social position would be treated in this era, to be honest
9 nameless is also interesting. i hope all my readers are sufficiently familiar with the importance of names in fairy stories
10 i kept expecting clarke to reveal that the raven king was also black, or at the very least non-white, but no dice
11 stephen and lady pole are forced to carry flags during these reenactments
12 there is quite a bit about the napoleonic wars in this book that i don’t feel equipped to discuss
13 at one point he places the entire city of brussels in north america and theres a couple of paragraphs that are almost gaiman-esque in their condescending anti-native racism
14 at one point calling them a “degenerate race”
15 readers of the book will forgive me if i leave discussion of some of the more minor characters out of this review. please be assured that the above-mentioned mr segundus holds a special place in my heart.
16 see percy jackson for example
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