Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna ClarkeBloomsbury, 2005 (Originally 2004)

I’ve been quiet for the last, um, month, but it’s not that I haven’t been reading. It’s that I’ve been (re)reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which has been totally excellent, but wow it’s a long book. I first read it in July 2005, and remember being delighted to be immersed in its world. More recently, my boyfriend and I watched and liked the BBC miniseries based on the book, which made us decide it was maybe time for a re-read. (He’d read it multiple times already: it’s basically his favorite book. I got him this t-shirt for his birthday last year and it was maybe the best present idea I’ve ever had.) So: I spent October and the first week of November delightedly, again, immersed in the world of this book, which is England in the early 1800s, but with magic. What magic is/means/does changes for the characters over the course of the book, though: at the start, magicians are basically all theoretical magicians/historians of magic: there hasn’t been a real practical magician in England in centuries, since John Uskglass, magician-king of the North, left and apparently took magic with him. But actually there is one practical magician, Gilbert Norrell, and then, after a while, there is another, Jonathan Strange.

There is way too much going on in this book for me to try to summarize it all: magic and a fairy and the Napoleonic wars and a prophecy and Venice and enchantments and oh, I almost forgot to mention, excellent/hilarious footnotes that sometimes take up multiple pages. Also, I love some of the descriptions in this book so much. Like this:

After two hours it stopped raining and in the same moment the spell broke, which Perroquet and the Admiral and Captain Jumeau knew by a curious twist of their senses, as if they had tasted a string quartet, or been, for a moment, deafened by the sight of the colour blue. (133)

Or this: “She wore a gown the colour of storms, shadows and rain and a necklace of broken promises and regrets. He was surprized to find himself addressed by her since he was quite certain that he had not spoken his thoughts out loud. (191)