Clarke's imagination is prodigious, her pacing is masterly and she knows how to employ dry humor in the service of majesty ... With a cheery tone, Clarke welcomes herself into an exalted company of British writers — not only, some might argue, Dickens and Austen, but also the fantasy legends Kenneth Grahame and George MacDonald — as well as contemporary writers like Susan Cooper and Philip Pullman ...prose can be rummy and startling, though a reader must put up with the occasional trope evoking the authorial style of other times... Impressive as magicians, neither Mr. Strange nor Mr. Norrell are particularly appealing people; they both seem like sidekicks out of Dickens, promoted onto a central stage before they've had the chance to develop as prime-time players ... In this fantasy, the master that magic serves is reverence for writing.
Neil Gaiman calls Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell 'the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years' ... Clearly Gaiman likes this book a whole lot ...at heart a book about the present's relationship to the past. In its pages Clarke takes the accepted fabric of English culture and inserts just a single new thread: that during the Renaissance, magic actually worked ...I wonder if this encyclopedic mirroring of so many Romantic styles and situations doesn't slightly weaken the novel by making it too capacious, too loose and baggy...Amid so much richness, I occasionally found myself yearning for a somewhat leaner narrative, but other readers may wallow in just this triple-decker plumminess. At any event, here is God's plenty, and there's plenty of it.
...those who find enchantment in books about magicians will, by and large, be amazed at the elaborateness of what [Clarke] has done. But this novel can be as fussy and poky as it is clever. It could have been improved by an editor with a magic wand ... The tricks, spells, illusions and footnotes — endless footnotes — also arrive at a tireless yet wearying pace. Inevitably, the book's drama is eroded by so many minor goings-on. They detract from the real wonders that the author has wrought ... Though she sorely lacks Ms. Rowling's expert timing, the two share a similar sense of play ... Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell has been celebrated as an adult Harry Potter story, but it is more like a flatter and flabbier one ...it does become the basis for a brand new fantasy world, an intricate and fully imagined universe of bewitching tricks. Maybe that's enough.
Like one of the eponymous magicians in her massive new novel, Susanna Clarke has arrived on the literary scene seemingly from out of nowhere ...Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is being talked up as 'Harry Potter for adults'...in her full-length fiction debut she displays great verbal dexterity and a firm command of narrative technique ...first 200 pages or so are full of witty dialogue, cunning observations and intriguing footnotes, but it's not clear at first whether this book will be anything more than a lovingly crafted pastiche, an overly extended exercise in style and tone more to be admired than enjoyed ... What distinguishes Jonathan Strange more than anything else is its good humor and expansive heart. Clarke displays her characters' foibles without making fools of them, and if Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell doesn't exactly end happily, it ends fittingly.
If Jane Austen had written fairy tales, they might read like Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell ...creates a world in which the pastel remnants of a much wilder medieval magic are studied by eccentric country gentlemen ... Strange is 782 pages long. And it's the result of more than 10 year's imagining, writing and research, a creation so densely detailed that the footnotes with which the text is larded pique rather than satisfy the reader's interest ...in a novel of Strange's scope there are other themes, other subplots, other finely drawn characters... but Clarke's most impressive show of authorial skill is in how she resolves this tension without destroying it.
Susanna Clarke concocts a wickedly credible parallel history of Britain in which magicians were as active and prominent as anyone else we learned about at school ...the defining features of Clarke's style simultaneously: the archly Austenesque tone, the somewhat overdone quaintness ('upon the Tuesday'), the winningly matter-of-fact use of the supernatural, and drollness to spare ...a sophisticated writer, crafting elegant metaphors...overall this large, loquacious book has nothing much to say, the plot creaks frightfully in many places and the pace dawdles ... There are many less crucial but annoying flaws and redundancies which sharper editing could have remedied ... Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is likely, in the months ahead, to be enveloped in a swirling haze of acclaim. Only when this initial enchantment wears off may Clarke's admirably inventive, frequently delightful novel open up to reveal its desolate spirit and its fear of the very forces it purports to celebrate.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is no Harry Potter knockoff. It's altogether original — far closer to Dickens than Rowling ... Clarke has concocted a thoroughly enchanting story of the early 19th century when Gilbert Norrell tried to bring 'practical magic' back to England ... In Clarke's wry, slightly arch tone, they provide faux bibliographic references and fill out England's magical history with myths and legends of the Raven King, who once ruled both human and faerie kingdoms ... Mr. Norrell is a wonderfully odd character in what's practically an encyclopedia of wonderfully odd characters ... Either by instinct or design, Clarke drops supernatural elements into the plot slowly and sparingly, luring fantasy readers along, while acclimating skittish newcomers to this genre gradually ... Move over, little Harry. It's time for some real magic.
Initially framed as a faux-scholarly, dry historical novel, complete with close to 200 footnotes citing magical texts and explaining references, Jonathan Strange initially lulls readers with the drawing-room realism of a Jane Austen novel ...the book flowers into a sprawling, wild adventure. Clarke seems as comfortable with her seamless blend of history and fiction as she is with her brand of antiquated spelling... Norrell and Strange's various movements throughout society, politics, the Napoleonic Wars, England, Europe, and ultimately Faerie are as phantasmagorical as any moony children's book about unicorns and dragons, but Clarke grounds it all in convincing, compelling style ...Clarke's gorgeous debut might simply have taken the Harry Potter books' slot as a proving ground, an example of how dedication, creativity, and skill can breathe new life into any genre.
Breathtakingly original, it defies conventions and expectations at every turn while all you get to do is sit back and watch its story unfold with a big fat smile on your face. It's no surprise that the back of the dust jacket features a fawning quote from Neil Gaiman... a sprawling, Dickensian story of a great magical rivalry in early 19th century England. Susanna Clarke confidently establishes her alternate-Earth setting as one in which magic once played an extremely commonplace role in the history of England...the story is episodic, but every event is precisely positioned in the narrative to build upon previous events and lead smoothly into upcoming ones. Rooted in two unique and memorable characters, the story just sweeps you up and carries you along, never lapsing to tired clichés nor trading in sentimentalism for its emotional depth.
Fans of Dickens and Austen will dive headfirst into this book, but I must confess that I found the beginning a long, hard slog ... a hefty, dense and heavily footnoted text, and I initially found the authorial voice to be intrusive and annoying. However, somewhere before the 100-page mark, I fell happily in love with the story and greedily devoured the remainder ...an amazingly detailed, ornate tapestry of a saga with shimmering moments of wry humor, threaded through with true tragedy. It is fantasy and historical fiction realistically combined and worth pondering, and sure to become a classic ...simply could not bear to see the end of the story approaching.
...English author Clarke’s spectacular debut is something far richer than Potter: an absorbing tale of vaulting ambition and mortal conflict steeped in folklore and legend, enlivened by subtle characterizations and a wittily congenial omniscient authorial presence ...a prophecy 'that one day magic would be restored to England by two magicians' and would subsequently be stimulated by the coming to national prominence of Gilbert Norrell, a fussy pedant inclined to burrow among his countless books of quaint and curious lore, and by dashing, moody Jonathan Strange... Clarke sprinkles her radiantly readable text with faux-scholarly (and often hilarious) footnotes while building an elaborate plot... There’s nothing in Tolkien, Mervyn Peake, or any of their peers that surpasses the power with which Clarke evokes this fabulous figure’s tangled 'history' ...instant classic, one of the finest fantasies ever written.
The drawing room social comedies of early 19th-century Britain are infused with the powerful forces of English folklore and fantasy in this extraordinary novel of two magicians who attempt to restore English magic in the age of Napoleon ...manages to portray magic as both a believably complex and tedious labor, and an eerie world of signs and wonders where every object may have secret meaning ...chock-full, old-fashioned narrative (supplemented with deft footnotes to fill in the ignorant reader on incidents in magical history) may seem a bit stiff and mannered at first, but immersion in the mesmerizing story reveals its intimacy, humor and insight, and will enchant readers of fantasy and literary fiction alike.
