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Science Fiction & Fantasy |
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Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Novel
written by Susanna Clarke
Studio : Macmillan Audio
by Macmillan Audio
Release Date : 2004-11-11
Publisher : Macmillan Audio
Released : 2004-11-17
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 9781593977412
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 723 reviews)
List Price : $59.95
Our Price : $13.89
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Product Description |
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The national bestseller is now available on audio!
English magicians were once the wonder of the known world, with fairy servants at their beck and call; they could command winds, mountains, and woods. But by the early 1800s they have long since lost the ability to perform magic. They can only write long, dull papers about it, while fairy servants are nothing but a fading memory. But at Hurtfew Abbey in Yorkshire, the rich, reclusive Mr Norrell has assembled a wonderful library of lost and forgotten books from England's magical past and regained some of the powers of England's magicians. He goes to London and raises a beautiful young woman from the dead. Soon he is lending his help to the government in the war against Napoleon Bonaparte, creating ghostly fleets of rain-ships to confuse and alarm the French.
All goes well until a rival magician appears. Jonathan Strange is handsome, charming, and talkative-the very opposite of Mr Norrell. Strange thinks nothing of enduring the rigors of campaigning with Wellington's army and doing magic on battlefields. Astonished to find another practicing magician, Mr Norrell accepts Strange as a pupil. But it soon becomes clear that their ideas of what English magic ought to be are very different. For Mr Norrell, their power is something to be cautiously controlled, while Jonathan Strange will always be attracted to the wildest, most perilous forms of magic. He becomes fascinated by the ancient, shadowy figure of the Raven King, a child taken by fairies who became king of both England and Faerie, and the most legendary magician of all. Eventually Strange's heedless pursuit of long-forgotten magic threatens to destroy not only his partnership with Norrell, but everything that he holds dear. Sophisticated, witty, and ingeniously convincing, Susanna Clarke's magisterial novel weaves magic into a flawlessly detailed vision of historical England. She has created a world so thoroughly enchanting that eight hundred pages leave readers longing for more.
Elegant, witty, and flawlessly detailed, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is the breakout smash of the fall—a magisterial first novel that draws readers into Susanna Clarke’s fantastic and utterly convincing vision of a past world.
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Americancivilwar.com |
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It's 1808 and that Corsican upstart Napoleon is battering the English army and navy. Enter Mr. Norrell, a fusty but ambitious scholar from the Yorkshire countryside and the first practical magician in hundreds of years. What better way to demonstrate his revival of British magic than to change the course of the Napoleonic wars? Susanna Clarke's ingenious first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, has the cleverness and lightness of touch of the Harry Potter series, but is less a fairy tale of good versus evil than a fantastic comedy of manners, complete with elaborate false footnotes, occasional period spellings, and a dense, lively mythology teeming beneath the narrative. Mr. Norrell moves to London to establish his influence in government circles, devising such powerful illusions as an 11-day blockade of French ports by English ships fabricated from rainwater. But however skillful his magic, his vanity provides an Achilles heel, and the differing ambitions of his more glamorous apprentice, Jonathan Strange, threaten to topple all that Mr. Norrell has achieved. A sparkling debut from Susanna Clarke--and it's not all fairy dust. --Regina Marler |
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Spreading the reach of British magic |
Illustrations by Portia Rosenberg
This book I found purely at random as I walked through the fiction section at my local public library in search of reading material (one cannot go home empty-handed from a place where books are being given away!), starting at the front of the alphabet, hence the author's name beginning with C. Surprisingly, this book has many similarities to Pynchon's Mason & Dixon: A Novel, which I had just finished, in its massive size (700+ pages, surely a determining factor in discovering Clarke's book in a random shelf scan), its purported historicity, its seamless and matter-of-fact incorporation of fantastic elements in historical settings, its depiction of the relationship of two men who are both friends and co-workers in fast public projects, and in their gentle ironic humor.
Clarke's writing style is not so raucous as Pynchon's, but the fantastical nature perhaps elevated. Mr. Norrell is famed as the only "practical magician" in England, an honor he has diligently sought and brought upon himself by purchasing all the books on practical magic he can find (except one who will make his appearance later!) and by discouraging all others from practicing (sometimes with the help of lawyers). Norrell is a retiring, gloomy, private man, not given to public spectacles of magic, but desiring to use his magic for the national cause. He becomes his own federal bureaucracy as it were, working with the British government to help defeat the French on the continent.
Jonathan Strange is a young, vivacious man (Norrell's polar opposite) in pursuit of a woman he hopes to marry who has no notion of becoming a magician, practical or theoretical, until he meets with the character I introduced above who reads off a philosophy that Jonathan Strange will become the second great magician of the age. Drawn to Norrell in London, the two become master and pupil as Strange learns his craft, and partners in public works as Strange joins the British Army effort against the French.
Unlike Norrell, Strange hopes to spread the reach of British magic, and to learn more about its ancient past rooted in fairies and the "slave king" John Uskglass. In pursuit of this goal, Strange loses his wife, his sanity, his friendship with Norrell, and unlocks a chain of events that he can't control that ultimately ends up almost all for the good, and therein is the source of a 782-page novel.
Much like Pynchon, I find it hard to rate such a tree-killing effort as a classic, despite the quality and enjoyability of the results. Well worth reading as a potential classic, but that rating weighed against the commitment of time it requires drops it to the second level. |
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A fun adventure. |
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I can understand why many people didn't enjoy the book; it is long and wordy in the British sense. Personally, I enjoy this, however, I concede that there are those who do not. The novel is witty and understated in its grandeur, but it is grand, nonetheless. Also, if you do not have at least a passing grasp of British history, the novel will lose some of its efficacy. I definitely recommend the book, just know your personal tastes before you commit to reading it. |
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The Indescribable Double Life of Lady Pole |
Picture an England during the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century, very much like the historical England, recognizable in many ways to readers familiar with the period, except that this England has a magical past, a distant connection to medieval English magic which has dissipated and diminished for hundreds of years but is now starting to come alive again. This is the setting of Susanna Clarke's wonderful book, which conjures up a familiar alternate England which becomes progressively more strange and fascinating as the story unfolds.
The seminal figure of English magic was The Raven King, a mysterious figure who emerged fully formed in the 12th century, a human child raised in Faerie, to become the ruler of the entire north of England for the next three centuries with his capital in Newcastle, and additional demesnes in Faerie and on the far side of Hell. The last of the golden age magicians, Dr. Martin Pale, was nearly contemporaneous, and upon his death the decline of English magic became manifest until our story opens in the early 1800s, when the self-taught bookworm Gilbert Norrell emerges in Yorkshire as England's first practical magician in nearly 300 years.
Like J.K. Rowling, to whom her work has been compared, Clarke is adept at plotting and characterization. Clarke has said that her favorite character is Childermass, Norrell's loyal and highly competent servant; my favorite characters are the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair (a powerful, volatile and amoral Otherlander) and Stephen Black, an admirable person who reminds me of a personal friend with a similar name. My favorite plot device is the hidden and indescribable double life of Lady Pole, which is as frightening as anything in Robert W. Chambers. Please believe that I have said nothing that will ruin the experience: you will enjoy this book. ***
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I can't even describe how inflated the ego is. |
Here is my 5 theses regarding this horrid novel
First, Clarke uses the plot mainly as a giant anticliche against all other fantasy books
Second, She elaborates more on insignificant people by writing long footnotes that only stress your eyes with the sall print
Third, She lacks good variety in character, and her style practicaly causes characters to contradict themselves
Fourth, the story is MASSIVELY discursive
Fifth, you say the writing is beautiful? Her style is very modern and, once again, discursive. She directly refers to and converses directly with the reader too infrequently, as well as writing rhetorical questions, prose of her own. Her style is a sad attempt to bring the book an antique feel to it, but I myself write like that, and I'm twelve...HER WRITING IS CHILDISH!
Any good quality there may be is definitely overshadowed by the above. |
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The endless VOID!! |
This would be a very enjoyable book for a very sheltered kid who isn't afraid of a big book. Maybe this is who gave 5 stars.
Everything other reviewers have said is true. Boring expressionless characters. Painfully simple plot that never builds up to any climax.
This is like the scenes in Harry Potter when they go to the the strange train station and then see the school with its oddities for the first time It is wonderous for the first 100 pages but instead of the story continuing this scene just keeps looping endlessly with different descriptions and dialouge for 900 more pages.
Mabye this is enough for some people.
If I had spent the countless hours watching clouds pass, it would have been more exciting.
Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom.-Nietzsche |
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