“'I myself am quite a tolerable practical magician.'”
Note before proceeding: I am writing these essays with the idea that I will be talking about the whole, entire book (or other work of literature.) In other words, while I’m not going to go out of my way to spoil things, I’m also not going to hesitate to discuss something or talk around it because it might be considered a spoiler. If you are someone who does not like to know things about books before you read them, please go read the book first! The essays will be here when you are finished.
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If you asked me to pick an all-time favorite book, it would be a near-impossible task. What is my mood? Are you asking on a Tuesday morning or a Sunday evening? Is this a favorite among books I came to as an adult or from books I loved as a child? But if you asked me to pick a list of beloved books, well, that makes things a little easier, and one book that I know for certain would be on that list is Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I love this book entirely, and have reread it multiple times. (Yes, yes it is 782 pages, what of it?) And it is almost always this time of year when I reread it – it strikes me as a very autumnal sort of book, especially if we allow our Autumn to be Keats’s season of mists.
There are many things I love about Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but one that I love the most is the way Clarke writes about magic, beginning with the moment that I first fell in love with the book.
The spell is a set piece that occurs at the Cathedral of York, and it begins with the tolling of the cathedral bells. Then, a voice begins to speak, a voice that “bore not the slightest resemblance to a human voice.” It is the voice of one of the statues in the Cathedral, and as the spell progresses, every other statue that can speak does – the Cathedral becomes a panoply of languages, voices, stories. The statues that cannot speak – the ivy leaves and rose briars and such – move. The Cathedral itself becomes rife with magic. Then the bells ring again, and the statues fall silent and still, the magic ended.
“The world had changed while the magicians had been in the church.”
No matter how many times I have read this scene, it still raises the hair on the back of my neck. It is gloriously eerie – the closest I have come, in prose, to the feeling of being in the presence of real, actual magic.
The piece of magic, the writing of the scene, it’s beautiful on its own. But the thing that makes it more than just an attractive set piece is that it’s interesting in context. It is performed by one of the titular magicians, yes, but it’s done by querulous, annoying, book-hoarding Mr Norrell. And it’s nothing to him. It’s so much nothing that he doesn’t even bother to leave his home of Hurtfew Abbey to cast the spell. Instead, he acts at a distance and sends his steward, Childermass, to represent him, and to make sure the consequences of the magic are enforced – the consequences being that all but one of those magicians mentioned above as being in the church and witnessing the magic done there can no longer call themselves magicians.
(In modern parlance, this goes beyond a flex and into the category of “dick move” on Norrell’s part, and while this is an early insight into his character, it also means that we – readers – don’t see him do the spell. The only thing on the page is the magic itself, more stunning in its isolation than it would have been if Norrell was present and acting directly as the spell unfolded.)
The next piece of magic Mr Norrell does on the page is to summon a fairy servant and raise a woman from the dead, actions with reverberations that echo throughout the rest of the book. But these are private actions, done with no one else in the room, and very little even on the page, to impress the reader who of course is always in the room with the characters. There is fanfare after, yes: Bringing someone back from the dead, and in gloriously romantic circumstances is not the sort of thing that goes unnoticed. But this magic doesn’t feel like magic, not like the spell at the Cathedral, and after this, we see strikingly little magic from Norrell.
By contrast, Jonathan Strange does his first piece of magic quite spontaneously, having only just decided to become a magician, and having bought the spell off of the extremely disreputable Vinculus the same day that he casts it. He assembles the necessary components from common household items and is so shocked when it actually works that he exclaims “Good God!”
For most of the book, even as his star rises and his abilities increase, this remains the tone of Strange’s magic – assembled out of bits and pieces of what is at hand, done to fill a need, practical, and almost homey – if it can be said that rearranging Spain to assist Lord Wellington is homey. It is easy to forget, as a reader, the power that Strange wields because he wields it so casually, and because he wields it so often. There are no ringing bells and talking stones and no sense that the world has changed. Only the doing of what must be done, even when it is extraordinary.
Then his wife Arabella is enchanted. A cruel, dire enchantment that looks like death so much so that it even leaves a body for Strange to bury. And his magic changes.
No, actually, that’s too passive of phrasing on my part. What that should be is: Then Strange changes his magic. He pursues the magic of the Raven King, of John Uskglass, of the fairies. He pursues the magic of madness, and his own spells become wilder and stranger. (And yes, I intend the pun there.) There is no longer anything comforting or homey or practical in Strange’s magic – but he doesn’t slip over into that early feel of Norrell’s magic, either. The magic that Strange does doesn’t feel eerie and beautiful, but rather elemental and terrifying.
It feels very much like Fairy magic. Unlike the magic performed by Norrell or Strange which is magic that is done, to me, fairy magic, such as what is present around the Gentleman with the Thistle-down Hair, such as the enchantment that takes hold of Lady Pole, and Stephen Black, and Arabella Strange, fairy magic is. It is the rain and the rock and the man who is a book. It is an innate power.
And so I am returned at the end of the book to where I was at the beginning: to a place where magic feels eerie, and uncomfortable, and as if the world has changed while I was reading.
If you would like to buy Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, here is a link where you can do so. That is an affiliate link, meaning that if you use it to purchase the book, I may receive a small amount of money. All quotations above are from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke.