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Praise for Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

'Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years. It's funny, moving, scary, otherworldly, practical and magical, a journey through light and shadow — a delight to read, both for the elegant and precise use of words, which Ms Clarke deploys as wisely and dangerously as Wellington once deployed his troops, and for the vast sweep of the story, as tangled and twisting as old London streets or dark English woods. It is a huge book, filled with people it is a delight to meet, and incidents and places one wishes to revisit, which is, from beginning to end, a perfect pleasure. Closing Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell after 800 pages my only regret was that it wasn't twice the length.' NEIL GAIMAN

‘I found it absolutely compelling. The narrative drive is irresistible and I could not stop reading until I had finished it. The narrator's tone is beautifully judged. It's full of wonderfully deadpan humour and its reticence leaves the reader to make up his or her mind about the characters. I loved all the invented scholarship and was fascinated by the mixture of historical realism and utterly fantastic events. I almost began to believe that there really was a tradition of "English magic" that I had not heard about. The author captures the period and its literary conventions with complete conviction. And a large part of the fun is seeing how an early nineteenth century novel copes with the impact of magic. It's an astonishing achievement. I can't think of anything that is remotely like it.’ CHARLES PALLISER

UK and US paperbacks of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, published 5th September 2005

'A chimera of a novel that combines the dark mythology of fantasy with the delicious social comedy of Jane Austen into a masterpiece of the genre that rivals Tolkien...

Clarke is an extremely funny writer, which is rare in fantasy ... But what really sets Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell apart is its treatment of magic. Clarke's magic is a melancholy, macabre thing, confabulated out of snow and rain and mirrors and described with absolute realism ... Clarke has another rare faculty: she can depict evil ... [she] reaches down into fantasy's deep, dark, twisted roots, down into medieval history and the scary, Freudian fairy-tale stuff. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell reminds us that there's a reason fantasy endures: it's the language of our dreams. And our nightmares.'
TIME MAGAZINE
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'This 800-page work of fantasy — think Harry Potter sprinkled with the dust of Tolkien and Alasdair Gray - posits an extraordinary alternative history of England where magic, fairies, spirits and enchantments were once part of everyday life ... the book darkens as rapidly as the sky on a wintry English day, becoming an increasingly bleak meditation on professional envy, betrayal, revenge, madness and despair. The spells, visions and enchantments, once sources of wonder and amazement, become infernal nightmares instead. This incredible work of the imagination, which took Clarke more than 10 years to write, ends all too soon. Perfectly balanced between outlandish fantasy and richly detailed historical reality, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell deserves to be welcomed into the modern literary canon, not just the bookshelves of fantasy geeks. It's pure magic.' NEW YORK POST
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'Clarke's novel, I'm pleased to say, just about deserves the fuss ... her imagination is prodigious, her pacing is masterly and she knows how to employ dry humor in the service of majesty ... With a cheery tone, Clarke welcomes herself into an exalted company of British writers - not only, some might argue, Dickens and Austen, but also the fantasy legends Kenneth Grahame and George MacDonald — as well as contemporary writers like Susan Cooper and Philip Pullman. Aging fans of T. H. White and young Turks who idolize Neil Gaiman will find much to their liking here, too. Clarke is generous in her homages. Obligatory nods are made to the notion of rings of power and books of spells ... It's clear that Clarke's library of books about magic rivals Mr. Norrell's ...

What keeps this densely realized confection aloft is that very quality of reverence to the writers of the past. The chief character in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell isn't, in fact, either of the magicians: it's the library that they both adore, the books they consult and write and, in a sense, become. Clarke's giddiness comes from finding a way at once to enter the company of her literary heroes, to pay them homage and to add to the literature, to slot this big fat book into our own libraries of spells. In this fantasy, the master that magic serves is reverence for writing.

As a fantasy writer myself, I'm inclined to overlook Clarke's excesses. Happily, she has the courage to poke fun at her own enterprise. ''He picks up a book and begins to read,'' she writes at one point, ''but he is not attending to what he reads and he has got to Page 22 before he discovers it is a novel — the sort of work which above all others he most despises - and he puts it down in disgust.'' Elsewhere she observes: ''Dear Emma does not waste her energies upon novels like other young women.'' Many charmed readers will feel, as I do, that Susanna Clarke has wasted neither her energies nor our many reading hours.' NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF BOOKS
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'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is at heart a book about the present's relationship to the past. In its pages Clarke takes the accepted fabric of English culture and inserts just a single new thread: that during the Renaissance, magic actually worked...

What makes the novel so impressive, however, is Susanna Clarke's flair for pastiche and her astonishing explanatory footnotes ... Over the course of nearly 800 pages Clarke channels the world of Jane Austen, the Gothic tale, the Silver-Fork Society novel, military adventure à la Bernard Cornwell or Patrick O'Brian, romantic Byronism and Walter Scott's passion for the heroic Northern past. She orchestrates all these fictive elements consummately well ... readers may wallow in just this triple-decker plumminess. At any event, here is God's plenty, and there's plenty of it...

Her footnotes ... represent dazzling feats of imaginative scholarship. To gloss the background of English magic, the novel's anonymous narrator provides elaborate mini-essays, relating anecdotes from the lives of semi-legendary magicians, describing strange books and their contents, speculating upon the early years and later fate of the Raven King. Some of these notes are simply wonderful folktales, others recall the gossipy 17th-century style of John Aubrey's Brief Lives, and still others convey the slightly prissy voice of an Oxford don correcting popular misconceptions...

Many books are to be read, some are to be studied, and a few are meant to be lived in for weeks. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is of this last kind ... it is still magnificent and original, and that should be enough for any of us. Right now all we really need to do is open to chapter one and start reading, with mounting excitement: "Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians...' WASHINGTON POST
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‘Rival magicians square off to display and match their powers in an extravagant historical fantasy being published simultaneously in several countries, to be marketed as Harry Potter for adults. But English author Clarke's spectacular debut is something far richer than Potter: an absorbing tale of vaulting ambition and mortal conflict steeped in folklore and legend, enlivened by subtle characterizations and a witty congenial omniscient authorial presence.

... Clarke sprinkles her radiantly readable text with faux-scholarly (and often hilarious) footnotes while building an elaborate plot that takes Strange through military glory, unsuccessful attempts to cure England's mad king, travel to Venice and a meeting the Lord Byron, and on a perilous pursuit of the fabled Raven King, former ruler of England, into the world of Faerie, and Hell ("The only magician to defeat Death!").

There's nothing in Tolkien, Mervyn Peake, or any of their peers that surpasses the power with which Clarke evokes this fabulous figure's tangled "history." The climax in which Strange and Norrell conspire to summon the King, arrive - for all the book's enormous length - all to soon. An instant classic, one of the finest fantasies ever written.’ KIRKUS REVIEWS

'This is the kind of book you want to move into and settle down in for a long stay ... Since one of the things "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" is about is what it means to be English (and not without digs at the arrogance, provincialism and class prejudice that goes along with it), the promise of a closing of this long-standing divide is most welcome. The novel itself achieves it, and in the consummation transcends anything as parochial as national character. Susanna Clarke's magic is universal.' www.salon.com
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'Clarke's narrative is ... packed with neat, deft touches; peopled with an intriguing and varied supporting cast; linguistically and socially utterly authentic in its evocation of its idiosyncratic version of its chosen era; movingly redolent of the author's affection for both her protagonists; and builds to a resolution that satisfies both logically and poetically' INDEPENDENT
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'Forget media speculation about the huge advance and the Booker Prize long-listing: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is not a book for cocktail gossip around a hip, urban table. It is a book for a favourite armchair, for readers in patched cardigans, with log fires and buttered muffins. Should your present circumstances offer none of these comforts, do not be deterred. You need only dip into this big, bubbling cauldron of a book to feel that Clarke has conjured them all for you ... Clarke's creation of a magical kingdom that can be fully cross-referenced lies more in the tradition of Tolkien than Dickens, her episodic storytelling reminded me of George Meredith, while the footnotes might have been added by a mystical Casaubon. A Wildean elegance is evoked each time a gentleman pauses on his front steps to adjust his gloves, or turns his wit on a hostess's wallpaper. This novel doesn't pretend to be as serious as the classics it admires, but it has an awful lot of fun dressing up as them...

... Magic is wrestled to fractious manageability in this book, rather as love is in Wuthering Heights: it comes down from the moors and rattles your windows when you let it, and when tamed it can accompany a clergyman's clever sister at her embroidery. Above all, Clarke makes her magical story ridiculously engrossing. I only wish I could summon up a book as imaginatively stodgy in which to hibernate next winter.' DAILY TELEGRAPH
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'An elegant and witty historical fantasy which deserves to be judged on its own (considerable) merit ... Susanna Clarke's magic is above all, though, a peculiarly English phenomenon, a kind of apothecary's tincture of a national eccentricity out of which emerges a host of vivid characters from every walk of early 19th-century life (realised in a series of haunting illustrations by Portia Rosenberg). But it is an eccentricity with a shadowy, uncontrollable side to it: in Ms Clarke's alternative England, as in the anarchic, fantastical underworld of G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday — surely an influence — the imagination is a place of fear as well as delight.' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
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'Susanna Clarke concocts a wickedly credible parallel history ... she is a sophisticated writer, crafting elegant metaphors ... admirably inventive, frequently delightful'
Michel Faber, GUARDIAN
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'Susanna Clarke's first novel inhabits and transcends genre fantasy ... there is a particular pleasure in reading a superior example of a genre which can be taken as a manifesto for what the genre should be. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a story about the prosaic world of early ninteenth-centure England; it is also, in its eloquence, its use of telling detail, its biting wit and its sense of the transitoriness of life - above all in its emotional and intellectual reach - a strong rebuke to the pastel colours and sub-Hollywood theatrics of most genre fantasy and a reporach to the lack of ambition of much mainstram fiction'
Roz Kaveney, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

'From the opening paragraphs of her dazzling, witty and gleefully entertaining debut, Susanna Clarke casts her own spell for 782 pages of a book you wish would never end ... A triumph of traditional imaginative strorytelling, this is an energetic, engaging and inventive tale that simple kidnaps the lucky reader to participate in a rare experience. Small matter if a book this good weighs over a kilo.'
Eileen Battersby, IRISH TIMES

'A tale of magic such as might have been written by the young Jane Austen - or, perhaps, by the young Mrs Radcliffe, whose Gothic imagination and exuberant delicacy of style set the key. Herein lies both its originality and its dissonance ... a wonderful tale about a marriage lost and found' Amanda Craig, NEW STATESMAN

'This is, in both the precise and the colloquial sense, a fabulous book ... the subject matter of Susanna Clarke's first novel is - much of it - beyond belief, and the author's achievement in writing it is almost as prodigious ... This is a novel large enough to provide an immense range of pleasures. There is plentiful comedy; there is rhapsodic description. There are drawing-room scenes and battle scenes, each carried off with dazzling aplomb. There is much astute observation of professional jealousy, of the vagaries of public opinion and of political finagling. There is a love story with an exquisitely sad but satisfying ending. Most remarkably, Clarke succeeds in binding all these elements together, alternating tart worldly wisdom with haunting other-worldly fantasy, to produce a highly original and compelling work'
Lucy Hughes-Hallett, SUNDAY TIMES

'Pick up Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and start reading. It is, as befits a novel about two rival magicians, spellbinding. By the time you're halfway through, you'll have realised why. This is fantasy not as a mad goth's dream but tethered in a meticulously observed, almost Austenish, historical background ... Bloomsbury, her publishers, talk about this book, which was a decade in the writing, as the best British fantasy novel for 70 years. Just for once, you can believe the hype ... prodigiously imagined, elegantly witty [and] superbly crafted' THE SCOTSMAN

'Anyone who likes fantasy will read it, or ought to, but a lot of people who normally stay away from the books in this column will find themselves enchanted by its sly wit, heavenly slow pace and gradual turn from comedy of manners to metaphysical tragedy' TIME OUT

'Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is wonderful. At almost 800 pages, it is an immense, densely plotted story, peopled with a a vast cast of extremely well-drawn characters, filled with unexpected events, ancient prophesies,varied and exotic settings, and all manner of human and inhuman conflict, and it is built one splendid scene upon the next.' GLOBE AND MAIL (Canada)

'Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell comes across as equal parts Jane Austen and Charles Dickens flavored with Rowling and Tolkien. Its inarguably one of the year's best and most original works.' NATIONAL POST (Canada)

'Gorgeously and richly bizarre, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is an enchanting experience from first to last word, brimming with charm, wit, creeping dread, and sense of wonder.' MONTREAL GAZETTE

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