jonathan strange & mr norrell (susanna clarke)

this book is just over a thousand pages long, and the first hundred are, frankly, a bit of a struggle. a paucity of other literary options meant i was forced to stick with it, and actually got quite hooked. clarke's style has a hint of the magical realist about it, in that she claims an authoritative, historical, narrative voice to recant a tale of fiction. although the book is about magic however, it does not quite have the flights of fancy so symptomatic of someone like marques: or rather, when they appear as a result of various spells, they're described in such a clipped manner of reportage the effect is of reading a textbook rather than a novel. as such, what you have is not so much a political statement reclaiming the concept of truth itself, but rather a mere, but neat, authorial trick to make the book more captivating, by virtue of the constant play between fiction and reality. her insistence on long, pedantic, footnotes, though intensely annoying at first, actually serves to further this effect of reading a compelling slice of actual history. good stuff, but you really have to stick with it through the opening... once you get used to the style, and the charismatic strange appears in the text to overcome the dull norrell, it's a very good read.