Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of //amy//.
So, I'm about three hundred pages into Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and I'm not quite sure how I feel about it yet, even though I'm moving along at a decent clip. But if there's one thing I'm appreciating, it's this: the book has helped me define how I feel about Faerie, as a place, as a concept of a society, and as a collection of characters.
I'm interested in Faerie as a way of exploring liminality, the borders of things, whether they're countries, or states of mind, or individual humans. In Michael Chabon's Summerland (highly recommended to all afficionados of baseball, American myths, and childhood), the ferishers (what the faeries call themsevles) are baseball fanatics, complicating and adding a mystical element to an incredibly familiar game. They're also the source of a changeling, and the way Chabon handles a character who has always known he isn't human, and the way that character discovers the truth of what he is, is beautiful. And the novel has a concept called "shadowtails," beings who are painfully caught between worlds but also have the tremendous power to move between them. In Possession, the fairy Melusina's double life represents all sorts of complications about sexuality, motherhood, women's roles in industry, etc. It can be a little academic and pretentious, but that's the point, that intelligent modern people use jargon to dance around the deeper truths of their lives. And in Will Shetterly's Elsewhere and Nevernever, Bordertown is the place where escapees from both the World and Faerie find refuge and create homes, as well as punk bands, Mexican restaurants, idiosyncratic but brilliant bookstores, gangs, and romances.
I like the idea of Faerie that grows and changes in a mirror of our own world, with the implications that our difficulties are tied to theirs and vice versa. I'm less interested in a cold, malicious race of people operating on reason totally different than ours. And so I don't know how I feel about the faeries in Jonathan Strange yet. The stuff with Stephen Black, the African servant of one of the main characters who becomes the object of the affections and ambitions of a faerie, is good, but less resonant for me. We'll see where it goes, and I hope to have some full thoughts to you all before the end of the week.