Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

I had been mulling a reread when my friend Sam picked this one up, so I jumped back in. I vaguely remember the buzz when the book was released was very much in the reductive “what if Harry Potter, but more grown-up?” vein, which is not what this book is, at all.

I’ve been reading a lot of Austen over the last couple of years, and I think Jonathan Strange made so much more sense to me this time around.¹ The way Clarke introduces her characters, the way she comments on their class and social position—there’ so much here that’s very much in line with Austen’s thematic and stylistic preoccupations.

I was also struck by how…leisurely it unfolds. Like, there’s a plot, but it’s kind of loose, as opposed to a machine always driving the action forward. At times Clarke introduces characters and you think, there could be a whole other book there, if she chose. The copious footnotes evoke the richness of lost English magical history. There’s a whole stretch with Jonathan Strange swept up in the Napoleonic wars on the European continent, and Norrell is basically absent from the book. At times it feels like a product of an era when novels were written in serial fashion.

I was surprised at how bittersweet and open-ended the ending is. In today’s never-ending, IP-mad world it would be a clear springboard into a sequel, but I prefer to think of it as Clarke simply stating that not everything gets tied up neatly.