Agreeing with the hype

Posted by Sari

It must be one of if not the most hyped fantasy ever, the buzz has been on at least since Neil Gaiman gave a thumbs up in his blog, and Bloomsbury's harrypotterhoned publicity machine has done a little too good a job about getting the message through: This is it, the Fantasy novel for adults, HP meets Jane Austen.

I am, of course talking about Susanna Clarke's doorstopper of a first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Which is not really Harry Potter meets Jane Austen, but Austen meets Dickens meets Dunsinay meets Mirrilees meets Chesterton meets Stoppard meets... And darn, it is good. I might have liked it even better if my expectations weren't so high to begin with, but even so: darn, it is _good._

For the first few hundred pages, I was a bit sceptical: Austenite language and period in a dickensian plot with a large cast of charicatures instead of characters. Style was exquisite, the invention delightful, but there was no emotional engagement. Oh, and how original: there was a prophesy about magic. But then but after Jonathan Strange made his appearance on the pages, and I was slowly but surely taken into Clarke's intricate, whimsical and totally believable alternative Regency. It turned out to be one of those books you want to live in, not just live with while reading.

Comments

[Tarja]

I read about one third (or half, can't remember) of this last year for Mikael and have been waiting for it to come out, so that I can finally read the rest of the story. I really liked the "excerpt" (if you can call a huge pile of paper that ;-)), and I think I might have mentioned the book in passing then, but it was a long time ago.

[Sari]

I remember. I was very jealous. What was happening when you left off?

[Tarja]

I dug up my old review of the book to look that up (it was too long ago to remember the details), and it seems I had 23 chapters of the book in that paper pile. That makes it about a third of the book, it apparently ended after the first chapter of the Jonathan Strange section.

I have the book waiting on my shelf, but at the moment I'm wading through the second part of G.R.R. Martin's huuuge Song of Ice & Fire series, so it'll be some time time before I get to it.