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What it argues
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a Victorian-style novel set in an alternate early nineteenth-century England where magic was once practiced but has fallen dormant. Mr Norrell, a reclusive Yorkshire magician who has spent decades hoarding every book of magic he can find, surfaces in London to prove magic still exists and puts it to use supporting the war against Napoleon. Jonathan Strange, a younger, more intuitive magician, eventually becomes his pupil and then his rival. Behind both of them, barely visible at first, is a dangerous figure from England's magical past: the Raven King and the Faerie realm he once ruled.
The novel is fundamentally about the tension between institutional control of knowledge and the wild, dangerous possibilities that come with genuine inquiry. Norrell hoards magic to manage it; Strange wants to push into territory Norrell considers forbidden. The Faerie storyline — which runs parallel to the main narrative and grows increasingly sinister — is where Clarke does her most unsettling work. Faerie in this book is not whimsical. It is alien and vast and entirely indifferent to human happiness.
What it gets right
- 1.
Hoarding knowledge to control it is presented as a kind of cowardice masquerading as responsibility. Norrell's catalog is both his greatest achievement and his most revealing flaw.
- 2.
Clarke's faerie is one of the most genuinely alien portrayals in modern fantasy — not dark elves or mischievous sprites but something incomprehensible and vast, operating on entirely different values.
- 3.
The footnotes are a novel-within-the-novel. Reading them transforms the book from a story about magicians into a texture of invented history that rewards close attention.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Susanna Clarke is a British author who spent a decade writing Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell while working as an editor at a cookery publisher. The novel became an immediate bestseller and won the Hugo Award for Best Novel. She followed it with a short story collection, The Ladies of Grace Adieu, set in the same world. Her second novel, Piranesi, published in 2020, is a much shorter, stranger book about a man living in a house with infinite halls filled with statues. Clarke lives in Cambridge, England.
