Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke

[ellarien]

papersky wrote about this book much more eloquently than I could ever hope to. These are just my own disjointed impressions and the associations that came into my head as I was reading.

It's not quite like anything else I've ever read -- certainly not like the usual run of fat post-Tolkien fantasy. The magic is real magic, wild and unpredictable and much bigger than the humans who dabble in it; the fairies are capricious and alien. There's a whole myth/history that , as far as I can tell, the author made up from scratch, but it feels like real myth. It comes into focus gradually, first glimpsed as tantalizing allusions, then explained in flamboyant footnotes some of which are multi-page stories in themselves.

Things it reminded me of: Thackeray; Dickens in fairy-tale mode; Sylvia Townsend Warner's Kingdoms of Elfin and John Crowley's Little, Big; Canaletto's paintings of Venice. (It can't be a coincidence that paintings very like the ones in the National Gallery show up in early scenes, and then the action moves to the real Venice towards the end of the book.) In the Peninsula and Waterloo scenes, I half expected Richard Sharpe to slouch across the background, but that's just me; the regency-era settings, domestic and military, are familiar from plenty of other reading.

I don't know if this is destined to become an obscure cult classic or the beginning of a whole new sub-genre, but it will be interesting to see what happens.