Given various events in my life, I have not been writing as much as I like. As a result of lacking this outlet to balance out the misery of my existence, my frustration, bitterness and anger levels have been rising to eye popping heights. That is why I will use this opportunity to release some bile and hopefully get myself into a more Zen place by reviewing Susanne Clarke's heifer of a novel: Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.
I had initially run across this book while browsing io9 looking for procrastination material and stumbled over their list of the 20 Best Science Fiction Books of the Decade. Being a fan of science, fiction and their mating in a literary format, I pushed aside my normal skepticism of any type of list that proclaims some thing to be the greatest of that thing this year/decade/century/epoch and dove right in. In all I was pleasantly surprised by the choices. I had read a good number of the titles in that list and most of them I would have rated as particularly good examples of fiction that just happened to be sci-fi. Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, was smack in the middle of this list and mainly caught my eye because I had never heard of it. The brief description drew the picture of two men bound by fate and arcane knowledge, if not friendship, venturing into a dark world and dabbling with things they did not fully understand. Not necessarily an original story but the fact that it was set during the Napoleonic Era gave it a rather fresh twist. Most hack sci-fi writers would have made them wizards trying to bring down the Nazis as Hitler was trying unleash Cthulhu. After having read the list I almost instantly forgot about the novel until I saw it squatting on the bottom of a friends book shelf. "Hey I heard that was good!" I exclaimed full of unbridled innocence "How did you like it?". "It's shit," he replied, his voice the dull monotone of broken dreams and cynicism. "You can keep it if you want but I warn you, it's really crap."
Oh if only I had listened to him.
The first thing that must be noted about the novel is that it is huge! I am fully aware I am prone to hyperbolic exclamations, but there is no way one could exaggerate this. Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is an elephant of a book. You could bludgeon a wild boar to death with it or re-purpose it as some form of incredibly cumbersome body armor. This should have been the first warning light for me. One of the most important skills a writer must develop is the ability to keep his story within reasonable limits. A story that rambles on for page after page, with not even a spark of light at the end of the tunnel is bound to lose at least half of it's readers by the halfway mark. Just ask fans of the Wheel of Time fantasy series. They had to chew their way through 12 books, the most svelte of which clocked in at a paltry 672 pages! Then the author died leaving the story unfinished!* You will not find a more broken or deluded lot that (former) Wheel of Time readers. Mercifully, JS & Mr. N is shorter than that, but it feels just as long given the almost suicide inducing awfulness of the writing. But first to the plot!
The central idea to the story is that England used to be full of magic**, and that northern England and much of Scotland was once ruled by someone called The Raven King for three hundred years who also had kingdoms in hell and in faerie, the realm of magic. Said to have been raised by faeries as a slave, he is credited with having become a king and the most powerful human magician of all time, doing several strange and magical things. Then he fucked off without explanation and history followed the books until the story starts. It takes many, many pages to get there, but essentially, Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell are the only two surviving magicians alive in England. The former, a well to do gentleman of leisure who wants to push the boundaries of magical knowledge to dangerous limits because he thinks he is the chosen one. The other, a erudite miser who cloaks himself in secrecy, seeking to stifle any dissenting opinion or potential competition. So an arrogant prick and a miserable prick.
Much of the book is concerned with the falling out of these two characters about what to do with magic and how The Raven King fits into all of this*** . In between we have a lot of stuff about the wars, a mischievous and vicious faerie king, a black butler, a trip to Italy, Lord Welllington and heaps and heaps of other stuff that just seems utterly unconnected with the central plot. At times there doesn't even seem to be a central plot. There is no real sense of conflict or growth. The characters remain essentially unchanged over the course of the world altering and disturbing events that are taking place all around them. They all act in that polite, stiff upper lip, stereotypical British manner that dictates they not show human emotion to occurrences that would cause any sane human being to flee for their life, screaming at the top of their lungs and wetting their pants. Clarke does manage to tie up many of the loose plot strings, but by that time, it all feels ancillary. The world is changed, but we never get to see it, we never get to know what happens to the protagonists. It's the ultimate cock tease, where she promises that something magical and wonderful will happen at the end of all this dreary and plodding bullshit and then shuts it all down when it seems like she's finally about to start. To make matters worse, the writing is so abysmal, that by the end, we have lost our literary boner anyway.
Susanne Clarke obviously intended the writing style of this novel to follow that of pastoral society tales from the early 19th century. I am of course referring Jane Austen novels. The book is bursting with inane blather about the lives of gentlemen, how they are meant to live and comport themselves, what types of activities they are expected to engage in, how they are supposed to make money, whom to marry etc etc etc. Entire story arcs are devoted to the social maneuverings of the magicians peons/social parasites. None of it brings us anywhere in the story and one feels that Ms. Clarke was trying to emulate that style of writing but completely failed to grasp what it was that made those stories compelling. As heinous as this is, it is not her worst offense. No, Ms. Clarke only truly moves into the contenders circle for Most Shit Piece of Literature of the Last Decade award due to her harrowing abuse of footnotes.****
First a caveat: it is obvious that Ms. Clarke has put a lot of work into creating her world, coming up with a history, rules, important characters who have shaped the events in the story through their actions long ago. It is quite compelling and she deserves credit for it. Unfortunately, she then realized that many parts of the story would be incomprehensible to readers as the characters casually refer to things we have no idea about. Her solution is just about the worst one could imagine: footnotes. Clarke violently crowbars several short stories worth of information into dozens of footnotes written in eye straining size 9 font. Having been a history student in uni, I am no stranger to lengthy footnotes, so I can say this with authority. I have never in my life seen footnotes this long!! In one memorable occurrence, there is a footnote THREE PAGES LONG!!! The term WTF does not properly cover the magnitude of this crime.
Wrapping all this up, the only conclusion that I can come to is that you shouldn't read Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I went in hoping for a tale of of dark magic, the struggle of conflicting personalities while on a road filled with danger trying to find a king whose morality might be completely alien to our own. Instead, I got Jane Austen's discarded novel Magic & Malfeasance. The worst disappointment is that not much magic happens. It starts out promising, when Mr. Norrell makes the statues of a cathedral come alive, and there are a few instances that do make you sit up. On the whole though, the characters just sit around, talk about magic, argue over which books of magic are best, how great England is and generally carrying on being stuffy and insufferable. A perfect cure for insomnia.
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* New writers were brought in to "wrap up" the series. So far they have released two more books, with a third one on the way, bringing the total to 15 books, 10,529 pages and 22 years to complete the story. Madness. Madness.
**You will read the phrase "good English magic" so often you will want to smash the face of any Englishman you encounter for such undeserved smugness, hopefully using the book.
***A character who never properly appears in the story but we are told is SUPER IMPORTANT and POWERFUL and that other characters can't stop blathering on about. Second warning light right there.
****IRONY!!!!
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