Jonathon Strange & Mr. Norrell – Susanna Clarke
Capitalizing on our penchant for stories about magic, this is a moderately entertaining book that should have been split into either two or three books or edited down to one more manageable volume. Set in the 1800s and revolving around the idea of English (as in England) magic, the story offered something different and is a good story. The length of it, however, gets a little tedious after a while.
The author uses one of my very least favorite writing affectations; the footnote. I’m sorry, but I feel that footnotes do not belong in fiction. There are those who think that, handled well, they expand the story, but to an anal retentive like me who has to look at the footnote, they destroy the flow of the story. Sure, I could just ignore them and read the story, but it always feels like maybe I’ll be missing something important to the story. In this book, I don’t think that the footnotes are a necessary part of the story and could be ignored. Towards the end of the book, I did start to skip them. It seems to me that authors who use footnotes in fiction, as in this book, have spent so much time creating their own little universe in which their book lives that they just have to share the background material they have imagined to support that universe. Just tell the story and be done with it. Let the story pull you into the universe you have created; don’t beat me over the head with a stick (or footnotes) to try to convince me. But, different strokes for different folks, and you may enjoy them.
Even after making to the end of the book, it had one of those endings that screams, “Sequel.” I won’t give it away, but it is obvious that there is more to come. If not, then you will just have to be satisfied with a story that does not wrap up all the loose ends. It wouldn’t be the first book to do that.
This story has been produced as a mini-series in Britain, and is available (or at least was, at the time of this writing) on Netflix (or is it Amazon Video?). I haven’t watched it, but apparently it has the slight variations that all films have from the original source material. At least it won’t have footnotes.
Finished 1/27/17