Feast of Fools

Just finished this book, which I came to with a certain amount of anti-intellectual-populist resentment - ie, everyone says I'm sure to love it, born to love it, have to love it on pain of death, but you CAN'T MAKE ME. I get this particularly strongly with anything plugged by a) the Guardian film reviews, b) my mother, and c) Neil Gaiman.

However, to my considerable chagrin, I loved it. Briefly, it's the tale of the return of magic to England, told in a gently pastiched Victorian/Edwardian style which owes much more to Austen in feel than Dickens. It's written in a spare style which is deceptively easy to read - I love that kind of writing, though after a thousand pages of the bugger I still haven't figured out how Clarke does it while still maintaining the kitsch-Victorian feel in all its wordy glory. She has a great line in describing things in a very minimal and practical way but then throwing in a random line of really evocative writing to make you smile.

I love it when she anthropomorphises buildings: 'The landlord had discovered that the Pineapple's dark reputation was good for business, and consequently he had never troubled to mend his house, other than by applying timber and pitch to the holes, which gave it the appearance of wearing bandages as if it had been fighting with its neighbours.'

The book sweeps up in a leisurely way from a beginning devoted to the small, prissy world of Mr Norrell, through the larger but similarly self-involved world of Mr Strange, into something considerably huger by the end. By about halfway through the growing feeling that something underlying the plot was drifting towards the surface was getting stronger, and I started seeing the Raven King *everywhere*. (Despite the fact that he was clearly going to be somewhere obvious and despite my considerable efforts to out-think the author, I failed to think laterally enough and didn't spot him in the most obvious place of all)

And despite the usual problem of writing huge and glorious epics - how in hell do you manage an ending worthy of that? - I think it was an excellent one. Not the self-indulgent one you wanted, but thoroughly satisfying and totally appropriate to the story. Which is most important, especially given that the whole book is (among other things) a commentary on the nature of story. Not just the main narrative either; it's full of tales, mini-stories in footnotes, reviews of books, comments on books - Susanna Clarke used to work for Simon & Schuster and lives with a book reviewer, and you can really tell ^_^ (I was amused by Messrs. Strange and Norrell's own reviews of the book on the author's website)

And finally, the names. All the character names are wonderful, and if there are meanings buried in all of them I was only up to a few (and I might have been imagining those, but then I think you were *supposed* to think that...)

So, yes. Good stuff. Not as hard to get through as it looks, and the author's great - I've just been reading her interview on her site, and good grief she's a geek, isn't she? :-D Starts her list with Jane Austen (I didn't know that when I wrote the above...) and ends with Joss Whedon via GK Chesterton and Alan Moore. Go figure.