Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Susana Clarke's first novel was published wide and far; nowadays you can find it in many bargain bins, a monument to the publisher's over-estimation of how high other boats would float on the giant Harry Potter tide.

At nearly 800 pages, this novel is 200-300 pages too long. The bad news is that almost all of the extra pages are at the front of the book.

Clarke seems to be intent on creating a world that is strikingly ordinary. That's not necessarily a bad idea-- part of the charm of Harry Potter is a setting that is simply a British boarding school that just happens to teach magic rather than accounting. But Clarke takes ordinariness to a deadening extreme. The first section of the novel is no more charming nor interesting than a detailed account of a clerk going out for groceries, written in a style that deliberately avoids any intriguing turn of phrase or striking image. The setting is early 19th century, but that only matters in that Clarke inserts some Napoleonic warfare and Lord Byron, but neither they nor anything else are presented with enough specific vividness to make us think they could not easily have been replaced.

And in Mr. Norrell Clarke gives us a main character who is totally charm-free. I don't mean charmless in a charming way, like Gregory House or any number of Jack Nicholson characters. Mr. Norrell is a main character with nothing to recommend him, from his fussy self-importance to his clueless choice of sleazy associates.

Put all together, it adds up to one of the most tedious set-ups I can remember reading in a long time (and I will remind you that it has only been a few months since I read Moby Dick).

On the other hand, the book's eventual payoff is pretty good, and once things start to actually happen, Clarke delivers a fairly well-crafted tale. The closer to the end we get, the better the book becomes (which is not to say that, even with seven hundred pages to set up the finale, Clarke does not pull a pair of plot developments out of thin air).

It is possible that Clarke is Up To Something Bigger here; the novel pays a lot of attention to books and reading and it may be, as some have suggested, that Clarke is using "magic" as a stand in for letters and literature. I could believe that's the case, but that doesn't illuminate the novel in any particularly useful way and it's certainly not an interesting enough theory to make me want to try to unscramble the various individual parts of the allegory.

Mostly what we've got here is a work that would have been a very nice little fantasy adventure had some editor taken a chainsaw to it. As it is, we have a novel in which the rewards are great, but the patience required to reap them is considerable.