But Georgia is not called for Trump?

 

Reporting percentage is greater than in Virginia but still no call.  Interesting.

Strange that Virginia is already called for Harris

 

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

This is a quirky, slow-paced novel with features that commend it and failings that detract from it.  The pacing is hard to overcome.  Generally, I maintain a rapid pace through fiction, but this was a long hard slog.  No sooner do you get involved in one storyline than Clarke plods off to some other character.  Steven Black, Lady Pole, Arabella, and the Graysteels were more often speed bumps than enjoyable characters.  By and large, they were helpless victims, which is rarely fun to read.  On top of that, many of the other characters lacked any redeeming qualities (e.g. Drawlight, Lascelles) and were therefore also a slog to read.  Moreover, if the words “I dare say” were removed from the book, it would probably be 20 pages shorter.  Why must everyone begin their sentences with ‘I dare say?’  That got old really fast.  On several occasions, Clarke would restate something obvious (e.g. ‘they left the dining room, where they had been convened’).  Um, yeah.  I was just reading how they were convened in the dining room, so you don’t need to explain to me that they had been convened there now that they are leaving.  Gads.  Early in the book, she also had a nasty habit of refusing to use pronouns.  Then she had some odd devices (thankfully abandoned in the later part of the book) such as suggesting conclusions to the reader rather than just stating them.  At one point, a lady is speaking and the author as a parenthetical note “who we must now presume to be Mrs. Wintertowne.”  Why must we presume?  Tell us or don’t tell us but this is almost insulting, as if I wouldn’t have figured it out on my own.  Finally, the narrative is murky.  The author refers to herself more than once but then drifts back to generally a 3rd Person Omniscient.  The footnotes give the impression that this is a scholarly work.  Then, there is the use of ‘we’ that includes the reader so that perhaps it should be viewed that she is reading to us in the drawing room, adding her comments as she goes.  Messy.  Distracting.

Jonathan Strange is clearly the hero of the novel and he is generally a likeable character.  However, he is curiously incurious about some things that should have demanded his attention.  Mr. Norrell had been brought to the pinnacle of success by having revived Lady Pole.  Despite several years as Norrell’s apprentice, Strange apparently never asked how Norrell achieved this feat.  Oh, he argues the minutia of a dozen other things but shows no curiosity over the defining achievement.  This is made all the more troublesome when Strange’s wife dies.  Gee, if only there was a way to bring her back.  Hey, Norrell did it!  I’ll ask him.  No, such does not happen.  Why?  Perhaps there are good reasons that he didn’t consider reviving his wife but that should be explained to the reader.  Speaking of his wife’s death, there was so much that was peculiar and yet he never saw magic in it.  He had credible reports of his wife in two places at the same time but never considered magic.  He had dueled with some invisible magician but never thought that magician would trouble him again, perhaps stealing his wife.  While trying to locate his missing wife with magic, he determined that she was not in England, Ireland, Scotland, or France but it didn’t occur to him that perhaps she had been magically spirited away.  No, he fully accepted that his wife had inexplicably wandered the snow-covered hills over several days and that led to her fatal illness.  Too often, this supposedly smart man was profoundly stupid.

Who was the man with Thistle-down hair?  Oh, he was a fairy but what was his history and how did he relate to the Raven King?  Clarke showered us with deep discussions on the history of English Magic, footnotes on obscure stories about minor magicians, and countless legends about the Raven King but she never explains who the villain is.  During the novel, we are told that a curse will end with the death of the person who cast the curse.  Okay, that’s good to know.  So, is Strange freed of the man with thistle-down hair’s curse?  No.  Why not?  And what kind of curse is that anyway?  It’s always nighttime around you?  Sure, it causes the candle bill to go up but that’s about it.  Strange seemed just fine otherwise (excepting the self-inflicted insanity).

There is a lack of focus.  Much attention was placed on the shopkeeper who had a crush on Steven Black and then, after the glowing coins incident, she simply vanishes.  The same can be said of Strange’s apprentices who are important for a while then, poof, he leaves them behind and, except for the brief incident of the disappearing book, they are not seen again.  Why did we get such a strong introduction of Jeremy (Strange’s servant) and his dealings with Strange’s father only to have him devolve to a very minor character?  Clarke feels compelled to provide massive character sketches for people who will soon vanish from the book or be relegated to minor support characters.  In many ways, the book can be seen as a number of short stories stitched together to make an overlong meandering novel.

It was nice to finally see the Raven King though his role was quite small.  However, we are led to believe that the prophecy that Vinculus repeated for the three concerned parties (Norrell, Strange, and Steven Black) was in truth just part of a spell to dislodge the Thistle-down man from Lost-Hope.  Could not he have been a bit more direct?  Am I to take it that John Uskglass arranged everything to work out just as it did?  Why didn’t he crush the Thistle-down man himself?  Why this roundabout solution?

It was hard to like any of the characters.  Norrell, who dominates the first part of the book, is extremely unlikeable.  Here is a man whose stated goal is to return magic to England and yet he spends most of his time squashing would-be magicians and concentrating all sources of magical learning in his own private collection.  Yes, he wants the return of English magic as long as he is the sole practitioner.  Hardly a return at all.  Worse still, he knows exactly what has happened to Lady Pole and makes no effort whatsoever to rectify the situation.  He takes on an apprentice and then intentionally misleads him about the true breadth of magic, best exemplified by the discussion over magic rings.  Norrell is to magic knowledge what China is to the internet.  As Norrell’s pawn, Childermass was usually on some disreputable task.  However, he developed into a far more likeable character than Norrell.   By the end of the book, I wanted to see more of Childermass.  Norrell’s other disreputable associates, Drawlight & Lascelles, were scum who took far too long to die.  This too speaks volumes about Norrell.  I have already discussed the problems with Strange.  Lady Pole starts off with promise but simply becomes a shrew – with cause certainly but a shrew, nonetheless.  John Segundus is rather bland and unexplored.  He has promise but his appearances are too far apart.  It is clear that he has some natural talent for magic (e.g. he sensed the labyrinth at Norrell’s home, he invaded the dream with Strange, he saw the rose over Lady Pole’s mouth, etc.).  Vinculus was the breakout character, fun in his every appearance.  A fraud, a charlatan, a bigamist, a mystical book, a vagabond, a prophet, and apparently unable to die (for now); this character was more interesting than any three other characters combined.  Unlike most character, he had real purpose, one that he diligently performed in his peculiar manner.  The rest of the characters are just victims, helplessly waiting for the mean Norrell or the oblivious Strange to rescue them from their captivity.  When they were finally rescued, I really didn’t care.  They had become nothing more than useful plot devices for the story, not actual characters that the reader should care about.

Clarke does a good job with Lord Wellington.  I enjoyed his appearances, such as they were.  Of course, the presence of Strange in Wellington’s army can’t help but diminish Wellington.  The book posits that Wellington would surely have lost Waterloo but for the help of Strange.  In truth, he won without Strange.  Still, that is a minor quibble that only a stickler for history would mention.

The massive background for English magic is amazing.  There is much on the history of John Uskglass the Raven King, as one would expect.  However, there are details on the Golden Age Magicians, then the Silver Age Magicians, even talk of the merely theoretical magicians, the qualities of Fairies, the lands of Fairy, and tales of Martin Pale, Catherine of Winchester, Ralph de Stokesey, Thomas Godbless, and others I have forgotten.  The depth and breadth of magical history is unparalleled.  I am reminded of Tolkien’s appendices that detailed the rulers of Gondor over the millennia.  With this impressive foundation, Norrell and Strange fit much more easily in England during the Napoleonic Wars.

The book ends in such a way as to provide plenty of room for a sequel.  There is the oddity of Childermass reviving the Learned Society of York Magicians to decode Vinculus the Book.  There is Strange assuring Arabella that he will return to her once he and Norrell undo the curse.  There is the tantalizing fact that the Raven King is still active though we saw but a glimpse of him.  However, I am unlikely to read anything else from Ms. Clarke on account of her failings.  If I had one suggestion for her, it would be to repeat Shakespeare’s observation that "Brevity is the soul of wit."  She needs a better editor who can cut away the vast excess in her narrative and keep her on point.

Two stars.