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.
