![]() ![]() She takes the time to establish loads of secondary characters, most who do pop up throughout the book to play critical roles in the plot’s progression. ![]() The prose is in period, and the story that Clarke weaves is complicated and highly detailed. The slow start is all part of the book’s genius. Does Susanna Clarke tell a good story? Is there any neat magic? If the book is too long for you to get past the first 100 pages, you might never know. ![]() Books like this are a huge commitment though, and so for a lot of people, the fact that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is over 800 pages long outweighs everything else about it. I know of many fantasy readers (myself sometimes included) who pick what book to read next based on how long it is - for epic fantasies, the longer the better. We don’t even meet Jonathan Strange until we’re almost a third of the way into the book. The story takes a while to get rolling, and by page 100 you are left to wonder how this can be a fantasy story when there is so little magic in it. This masterwork of historical fantasy, released in 2004, is a thick tome and is written in the deliberately dense prose of the period - with footnotes. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, would be “daunting”. Norrell)Ī good word to describe my initial impressions of Jonathan Strange and Mr. ![]() (A Book Review of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. ![]()
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