So, I finished Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell last night. And while I always intended to finish it, I appreciated those of you who encouraged me to keep going: the end of the novel has tremendous momentum. All the guns that are hung on all the walls of all the houses of Clarke's plot were fired by the final scene, and I appreciated that. It's always nice when an author demonstrates some mastery over the intricacies of her own making.
That said, I didn't love the book as much as I'd hoped to. For a book that's all about magical theory and practice, and that has a very strong magical idea--that magic is inherent in England, and available to anyone who wishes to find it, no matter their age, gender, class status, or skin color--the book does remarkably little to actually outline how magic works within its universe. There are no rules about what magic can and can't do. Most spells are spoken, or rely at most on water in a silver basin, but there's no trajectory for how one becomes a good magician, and whether magical ability has anything to do with talent, or inherent magicness, or anything else. One of the best devices in the novel, the King's Roads, which lie behind all the mirrors in the world, gets only very limited use. The magicians themselves don't even seem particularly sure about how they grow in magical power, or how they work some of the most complicated and impressive magic that occurs during the novel--or perhaps Clarke just doesn't bother to explain it. But as a result, instead of feeling drawn into the world of the novel, I felt somewhat aloof and suspicious of it, except when I found myself entranced by an image like the column of perpetual night.
Second, I'm not sure how well the novel works as a pastiche of Dickens and Austen. There's almost none of the genuine social comedy that marks Austen. Arabella Strange, the wife of one of the titular magicians, and Lady Poole, both of whom display the pluck of true Austenian heroines towards the end of the novel, spend a lot of the key sections of the novel out of commission as a result of enchantment. Flora Greysteel, another fine candidate, shows up mostly through the eyes of her father and aunt, who see her as a lovestruck young lady, not as the budding magician she actually is, and it's a genuine loss for the novel. Drawlight and Lascelles seem to be the Dickensian villains, though they drop out of sight, again, for significant chunks of the novel, and when Lascelles is revealed to be truly dastardly, it comes as a surprise, rather seeming like a logical progression; he mostly seems like a nefarious but limited clerk until he becomes a murderer. As much as I enjoy the Napoleonic Wars section, it's essentially irrelevant to the plot.
In other words, I really did enjoy the novel. But like some of the Harry Potter books, I wonder if it might have benefitted from stronger editing. At 200 pages shorter, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell would be a brisker read, and could easily include all of its most striking and vibrant passages, plot developments, and images. That's true of a lot of novels. But there was so much that I wanted to like about the novel that I feel it keenly in this case. Apparently, Clarke is working on a novel about two of her best minor characters, John Childermass and the street sorcerer Vinculus. I'm intrigued by the idea, and when it comes out, I certainly won't let it linger on my bookshelf for three years.