Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

"This really is one of my all-time favourite novels – it’s possibly my favourite novel by a living person. It doesn’t fit the typical mould in that it’s not set at a university or a school. It’s set in England during the Napoleonic Wars, and it’s about two magicians. Magic has long since faded from the world and become a dry theoretical topic, until Mr. Norrell figures out how to do it for real. He is actually a very realistically depicted academic, in that he’s unbelievably dry and humourless, and just spends his days and nights beavering away at the minutiae of the topic that he studies. At the same time, another magician arises, Jonathan Strange. He’s much more the dark academia avatar: he’s tall, aristocratic, funny, good-looking… Strange and Norrell have opposing ideas about what magic should be and where it comes from. Norrell is a moderniser: magic is a tool, it’s useful, but we shouldn’t get any dark academic ideas about it. Jonathan Strange is all dark academia: he wants to follow magic’s roots back into the past and into the fairy world, back to this mysterious figure named John Uskglass, the father of English magic. Norrell and Strange desperately need each other because they’re the two geniuses of magic, but they also can’t reconcile their opposing philosophies. Meanwhile, the Napoleonic wars are happening, and lots of fairies are running around… It’s a truly amazing book. I don’t know if I’ve ever read magic described so convincingly. Yes!. It is adorned with its own internal academic apparatus, these brilliant footnotes, which initially gave me bad flashbacks to Infinite Jest , but then I realised that they were their own thing. They’re a wonderful, whimsical way to provide context and history, and they seem to gesture at this vast academic literature of magic which is out there – without, of course, giving you the whole of it. That’s also part of that dark academic feeling: this sense that there is a vast body of hidden knowledge, and you are just brushing up against it and getting the tiniest sliver of it. You feel this sense of the sublime, of everything that must be out there, just out of your reach."

"Only this time with wizards and English magic! I chose this book because it really blurs the line between fiction and history. Just the use of footnotes and references to texts that likely don’t exist yet unless Susanna Clarke writes them in! I thought it was really fascinating because, by the time I was halfway through this book, I really believed in this world. I picked a side, I was a Norrellite—I don’t know which side you were on? This book a really good example of how novelists can mimic core historical narratives and give you something that is weirdly believable within the framework of its own reality because, again, this is how we construct history: I get my references, I note something down, I give footnotes and say here is an authoritative text—believe it. It’s very clever. I just found Jonathan Strange a little unknowing and impetuous in his practice of magic. Whereas Norrell, who had been around for years, amassed this collection and bested the theoretical magicians. I thought he had the stronger claim to directing English magic going forward. And, in my own work, I really like this miserable type of character. I’m just drawn to them for some reason. It’s one of those things, particularly when you start thinking about magic realism as a novelistic form, that gets us to a question. We’ve now largely, because of education etc, adopted this western, scientific perspective of what the world is. But think about most peoples in the world. Take, for example, the story of Rome—the twins who were looked after by a wolf and then built Rome. Prior to literacy, a lot of the world’s cultures collected their history in the form of myths and fantastic stories. And so, when you get that in a historical novel, it might actually be a return to the way that things used to be, as opposed to a brand new innovation. Magic realists almost take these fantastic elements that are part of certain South American cultures for granted. It’s like people walk around and they see ghosts—yes, this is what happens. “There is one school of thought that sees history as a process of forgetting rather than remembering.” I certainly think that perspective is interesting to say, ‘Okay, we can reincorporate fantasy into our contemporary existence which is largely scientific these days anyway.’ I think it comes from a certain consistency in the world-building of it. What Susanna Clarke pinned down so well is that she managed to build this believable artifice that was buttressed by texts that don’t exist. I think that’s why it works so well."

"It’s hard to pick one book to represent all the richness and coolness that’s going on in fantasy right now, in the present moment. But I have to, so I’m picking Susanna Clarke ’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which was published in 2004. The humour and sadness and beauty and complexity of this book, which took Clarke 10 years to write, are like nothing that came before it. Unlike the fantasies of the 1920s and 1930s, Clarke’s book isn’t about people losing a world – instead they’re rediscovering magic that has been lost for centuries, and reacquainting themselves with both its great boons and also its enormous costs and the sorrows they bring. It’s a magic that feels absolutely real, as if the book were an eyewitness account. Not since Lewis has the supernatural been such a thrilling, immediate, concrete presence on the page. It’s no accident that I began The Magicians in 2004 – Strange is the book that woke me up to the power of the new fantasy. Read it, and you may be woken up too. Writers like Clarke aren’t just the future of fantasy, they’re the future of literature. We’re living at a time when more and more readers are turning to what used to be dismissed as genre fiction – fantasy, young adult novels , mysteries, science fiction, romance – to get what they used to get from literary fiction. The reign of realism, which began in the 18th century, is finally being eroded. Writers like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem and Kazuo Ishiguro and Colson Whitehead are crossing from literary fiction into genre fiction, just as Clarke and Link and Gaiman and the others are crossing the same divide from the other direction. They’re interbreeding the two forms, to create new and vital kinds of novels for the new millennium. They’re our literary avant-garde. They’re the writers who are mapping out the future of the novel. From where I sit, it looks fantastic."

"This book reads as though the book that formed the fantasy tradition was Lud-in-the-Mist , and everybody had been writing in that tradition ever since. It’s at that social level, and it is using the numinous and magic in the same way. The wonderful thing about Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is that it introduces strangeness, and once that has become familiar to the reader, it introduces a new level of strangeness. It’s about magic coming back into England at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. It is about a wizard and his apprentice and the apprentice’s wife, and various other people that they know, and an enslaved person and fairies, and all these people’s interaction with the other – as over and over again, she brings us more otherness. It starts off with Mr. Norrell going to the meeting of magicians, and he’s got real magic. And when we’ve got used to his magic, we have Jonathan Strange, who’s got different, more-magical magic. And then when we get used to Jonathan Strange, we get the man with the thistle-down hair – we get fairy, and the Raven King, and more and more magic. So whenever you get accustomed to the magic, you get a new level, and you get discomforted again – which is just wonderful and astonishing, and a marvellous thing to do. All of these books, and most books that deal with fantasy and with fairies, are trying to evoke this numinous-ness – the note that you have in Lud-in-the-Mist. Susanna Clarke hits whole chords of that note by bringing in new levels of estrangement, new levels of weird. When I reviewed Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell , I said that it is as if we were all on the beach making sandcastles, and Susanna Clarke raised up a great castle made out of the sea. That is the metaphor in my head for that book. And I always think of that when I think of it, the castle made out of a wave, the impossible castle that can drown all the sandcastles that we were trying to build. It is a phenomenal book. I don’t love it. I admire it no end. But I don’t love it, because it doesn’t let you ever be comfortable, and you are always on edge reading it. Which is right for fairies! Fairies are an uncomfortable thing. They’re an element that puts you on edge. But it makes it less lovable than some of these other books. Clarke’s more recent book, Piranesi – which has no fairies – I just love. I love Piranesi , and I love some of her short stories; I just adore them. Whereas Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell , I think, is a really major novel – we were correct to give it all the awards, we were correct to make it a bestseller and have everybody read it and give it all this attention, because it is really phenomenal – but it’s a little bit uncomfortable. After a long dry spell, I have two books coming out this year, a collection of essays about science fiction and fantasy written with my friend and fellow writer Ada Palmer . That’s called Trace Elements and it’ll be out in March. And in June I have a fantasy novel called Everybody’s Perfect which is about a fantasy Venice ."