Strange Tales & Practical Magic

Ten years in the forging, Susanna Clarke’s debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell comes heralded by Bloomsbury as one of the year’s flagship books, and sure enough, on its publication in America, the tome made top five in the New York Times bestseller list. Reviewers for Time, the New York Post, the Times Literary Supplement and the Irish Times frothed, while readers who appreciated Rowling’s craft but wanted rarer, darker meat, rejoiced.

Strange is also striking a blow for quality fiction at a time when Dan Brown penned tomes are polluting the bestseller lists. With sundry Da Vinci Code-manque rip-offs also flourishing in literary circles in the wake of the American author’s break-through, Clarke’s inventive, Alan Moore-style epic could scarcely have made a more timely arrival.
Clarke’s novel takes place in an alternative 19th century, when the practise of magic has deteriorated from its origins (the melding of fairy wisdom and human reason by the mad, mythical Raven King, a human child raised by fairies) into academic decay. Enter one Mr. Norrell of Hurtfew Abbey, whose expertise rejuvenates the form and brings him into contact with the Byronic figure of Jonathan Strange. The rest is history, albeit an elaborate imaginary one.
This central theme of the book, Norrell’s mission to bring magic out of the abstract and into the field of practical application, might be said to reflect Clarke’s own literary intentions, the eschewing of experimentalism in favour of story.
“The idea of a magical tradition that needs restoring in the 1800s, it’s quite a classical idea in fantasy that there’s some golden age which we’re always trying to get back to,” she says. “It’s there in the first Narnia book, The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe. Things have gone down from the beginning when people and animals were living in wonderful harmony, and then the witch wanders along and makes it winter, so you’re trying to get back to the natural order of things. And that is there in Strange & Norrell, that once upon a time there was a thriving community of magicians and fairies doing magic and it was relatively controlled and working, and now it’s got debased into this very academic thing of men just studying the history of it in libraries.”
Clarke, a soft-spoken woman whose youthful demeanour bears out the inadvertent monk-like skin-care regime of a long-term scribe, was born in Nottingham in 1959, the eldest daughter of a Methodist Minister. She left a succession of jobs in non-fiction publishing to teach English to Fiat executives in Turin, and on her return to England in 1992, she began working on Strange & Norrell. Over the next ten years she split her time between fiction and a post at Simon and Schuster’s Cambridge office editing cookery books.
“It was ten years, but it got harder the longer it went on because I could see the years piling up behind me,” she says. “My biggest fear was not that it wouldn’t get published, because I knew there was an American publisher interested in it, but that I wouldn’t be able to finish it. I’d finished some short stories but I’d never finished anything this big. I had a stressful and demanding job, and I have limited energy, I’m not Neil Gaiman who can do a film and two books and a tour …”
How did she summon the gumption to write such a mammoth story as her first novel?
“You get mistaken. You think, ‘Oh I’ll finish the year after next.’ And I thought it would be 100,000 words shorter than it turned out to be. But my instinct was always to complicate things, and since I was writing largely for myself, there was nobody to tell me stop – which is a bad idea. I just wanted to write the kind of story I like, and I quite like complicated stories.
“I’ve just done three and a half weeks in America, and every so often you get an interview where they say, ‘What are you trying to tell us in this story, or is it just a story.’ And there’s this idea that if something is just a story it’s worth less. Whereas good storytelling, I think, is very good for us. Philip Pullman has been saying the same thing in articles for a number of years; that narrative is actually very, very important. It’s healing in a way. At a bad time in your life you can turn to a good story and find a comfort there that you won’t get anywhere else.”

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is published by Bloomsbury