I have just finished this 1006 page monster by Susanna Clarke which has taken almost all of January. I generally have a problem with a lot of female authors, whether I have only read crap ones I'm not sure, but I have found many to be the over-descriptive and prone to getting sidetracked (an enormous generalization, but it has made me wary of some books); so I entered this with trepidation.
Its about 1840, and Mr Norrell, an aging magician sets his sights on restoring magic to England single-handedly, something that has been lost for around 300 years. After expelling almost all other magicians due to his opinion they were lame, he takes on what becomes to be his genius protoge- Jonathan Strange.
Strange soon becomes England's darling after his work with Wellington in helping defeat Napoleon, but tensions between the two magicians grow increasingly, with Strange's bolder use of magic and desires to house a school of magicians not fitting with Norrells more conservative use.
The book is written as if it were an actual history of magic pre-Daniels- the rewriting of history is becoming more common in art (something I practice in painting) and literature, and it is done to great extent throughout, Clarkes frequent footnotes (sometimes a few pages long) helps to annotate a subject that has been stripped clean of its actual history, and reinterpretated by Clarke.
I found this thoughly enjoyable, I kinda wished the history Clarke wrote about was real, because not only was it much more exciting than I would imagine magic's real history is, but it was so well described, I would have felt I knew the full ins-and-outs of magical history. It definitely could have been shortened, a few paragraphs, and even characters were reasonably pointless, but on the whole, damn fine.
No comments:
Post a Comment