Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke had been on my TBR list for a very long time, and it was one of the last books I listened to while I was still commuting, pre-pandemic, to work every day.
This book was long and sort of dense, but I enjoyed it all the same. The story takes place in sort of an alternate victorian England where magic has left but has made a return in the form of our title characters. Strange and Norrell have to navigate their complex relationship as the only two magicians left in England. They have different ideas of what magic should be and do.
I’m not going to lie, if you’re looking for a fast-paced, action-packed fantasy adventure, you’re going to be disappointed. What this is is a study of complex character and a sort of mystery. The magic had strange rules, the fae were part of the book but not the biggest part.
I listened to this book but didn’t read it – supposedly there are footnotes and illustrations and so if you’re someone who gets a lot of the reading experience this might be a book to read instead of to listen to. I listened to it because it’s much easier for me to listen to books than to read all of them, but this is one I’d like to go back to if given the opportunity to read it.
As I said, I recommend this if you like alternate history, complex characters, and speculative fantasy. I wouldn’t recommend this if you’re looking for the George RR Martin style fantasy, or Tolkien style fantasy, or even Harry Potter style fantasy. The tone is masterful and the prose is great, but it’s not a typical fantasy novel in terms of action or magic. It’s part of what makes it special.
Tag Archives: genre: fiction
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
The Art Forger
My last book of 2019 was The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro.
I won’t say it was bad, exactly, but there were parts of it I didn’t care for at all.
The plot is set against the backdrop of the still unsolved theft of thirteen priceless paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, the most valuable of which were taken from ‘The Dutch Room.’ The most valuable piece of art itself was a painting called ‘The Concert‘ by Johannes Vermeer (a work you are probably more familiar with is ‘Girl With a Pearl Earring‘). There are only 34 paintings that are attributed to him in the world. In spite of a ten million dollar reward, the stolen artwork has never been recovered. Considering the value of the artwork is now considered upwards of $600 million, maybe no takers for the rather generous reward isn’t surprising. You can read more about the art theft here and here.
Claire Rothe makes her living forging famous artworks for an online retailer. She enters into a Faustian bargain with a gallery owner who will show her own original artwork if she’ll forge one of the Degas works stolen in the heist. Claire doesn’t ask questions about how the supposedly original Degas work from the theft was acquired but she begins to suspect it’s also a forgery. Claire is made out to be particularly hard up; even though she is a talented artist with an excellent talent and skillset, she is persona non-grata in the art world.
And this is the part of the story that I really, really didn’t like. Claire is persona non-grata in the art because while she was sleeping with one of her professors who is the great artist Isaac somebody or other (who I think is also cheating on his wife), he’s having some kind of artistic block and she paints a painting for him that he takes credit for. It becomes absurdly famous and when she says, “Hey, I painted that, give me credit,” he turns on her. There’s an investigation where she reproduces the work and he can’t, but the investigation concludes that she forged the work basically so everyone can save face. Isaac eventually kills himself without clearing her name (still, yay though) and Claire is blamed for this and is further unwelcome in any meaningful art circles.
There was also the inevitable romance with the gallery owner that left me sighing in ‘Can we please get past this part?’ as well. He’s young and rich and handsome and charming and in over his head and Claire saves him. It was so predictable.
Anyway. What I really liked about The Art Forger was the art stuff. The art history, the oddly specific information about paint, the mystery of the Gardner Museum theft and the mystery of Gardner herself. The mystery about the shady dealings of the gallery owner was also actually pretty good in terms of plot. The only stuff I really disliked was Claire’s ‘Backstory of Sad and Dumb’ which was a lot of the book. I dunno. Maybe I am unusual or dysfunctional or programmed incorrectly or whatever, but I never fell for manipulative guys like Isaac. I never believed them when they said only I could help them. I love my husband very much but I don’t for one second think that I am the only one who can save him from his own artistically void state of blah blah blah BS. Most romance bores me at the best of times and this tragic romance of young woman manipulated by her professor into painting a masterpiece she never gets credit for and he kills himself over thereby doubling her burden had me rolling my eyes so hard I pulled a muscle.
I guess this book is for somebody. It wasn’t for me. The art stuff was awesome. The rest? Meh.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Aside from A Christmas Carol (which I try to read every year at Christmas) and A Tale of Two Cities (which I’ve read twice), this is the only other “full” Dickens book I ever read (excluding other short stories).
For those who don’t know, The Mystery of Edwin Drood holds a unique place in literature. I believe it’s the only whodunnit that doesn’t have a ‘whodunnit’ reveal, because Dickens had a stroke in the middle of writing it. Literally in the middle – twelve parts were planned, six had been published. He left no notes on the last six installments and just died in the middle, and the general public has been trying to solve the mystery of Drood’s disappearance for 152 years. It was pretty selfish of him to die in the middle of the story but that’s how it goes sometimes 😉
Anyway, the novel follows the teenage orphan Edwin Drood (imagine!) as he goes about his business, which is to say, he hangs out with his betrothed, he visits his uncle, he makes plans for his future (going to Egypt to work as an engineer where his father had been a partner). Unfortunately for Edwin, he and his fiancé like each other but fight a lot, his uncle is an opium addict who (in addition to hanging out in opium dens, also likes to hang out in crypts) may wish to cause him harm, and his future is left in question when he disappears under mysterious circumstances.
There are other supporting characters and other mysteries as well – why was Princess Puffer following and cursing John Jasper (Drood’s uncle)? How do the Landlesses fit in? Who is Dick Datchery?
As I said, Dickens’ death leaves the work unfinished, with subsequent generations of readers trying to crack the mystery of Edwin Drood. Was Drood murdered by his uncle? Or was he going to triumphantly return, wealthy and successful from Egypt?
While there are no known notes or clues to how Dickens was going officially end the story, certain clues do point in the direction of John Jasper murdering his nephew. First, there are the out of story clues:
1. Dickens wrote a letter to his friend/biographer John Forster outlining the plot (although not the murder) and describing the story as the murder of a nephew by his uncle.
2. The story’s original illustrator was told to include a certain scarf in one of his illustrations because Jasper was to strangle Drood with it.
3. Dickens’ son was told unequivocally by his father that Jasper was the murderer.
Even before reading up on the unfinished story, the text also provides a lot of clues, which I won’t spoil here, because the mystery is still fun, even after a century and a half.
As always, Dickens character names are some of the most memorable you’ll ever come across.
I actually loved this story, even though it was unfinished, and no Dickens fan should skip it.
Christopher Buehlman
After reading Those Across The River in 2018, I decided to finish up Christopher Buehlman’s published novels in 2019. Or at least the ones available to listen to in my library. I listened to these while fixing up my home before moving in, so they were great for passing time.
Those books were (in the order that I read them):
The Lesser Dead
The Suicide Motor Club
The Necromancer’s House
But let’s do this backwards, because I didn’t finish The Necromancer’s House and was less impressed with The Suicide Motor Club. The Necromancer’s House was a snoozefest. The premise was super promising – a guy can speak to the dead through film and ends up being chased by a monster out of Russain folklore – but I just couldn’t get through it. Maybe I’ll try again, maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention, but it just didn’t grab me.
The Suicide Motor Club was a revenge story. It takes place in the 1960s and involves a group of nomadic vampires driving around highways in muscle cars, taking victims from car wrecks (that they cause). They accidentally leave a live witness after wiping out her entire family, and she joins a convent in the hopes of finding peace. Years later, she’s approached by a group of vampire hunters, with a goal of wiping out all the vampires, especially the ones in the fast cars. She’s the only one who can recognize them. This one was pretty good but it dragged a bit in the middle, and it wasn’t as good as the The Lesser Dead, which it was tied to through a character named Clayton.
The Lesser Dead was definitely the best of these three books and the scariest fiction book I read in 2019. If you want to feel discomfited through an entire book and especially at the end of a book, this is the story for you. The book follows Joey, a vampire living in the New York underground in 1978. Joey was turned by Margaret in the 1930s, as revenge for getting her fired from her job as a cook.
Anyway, in spite of this antagonistic relationship, Joey is now part of Margaret’s nest of vampires, along with some others. Vampires are corpses that are all in varying states of decay, and have to use their glamor magic to project the image of health to humans and other vampires, and this is how Joey in particular sustains himself: he goes to night clubs and parties, picks up women, and drains them.
The nest of vampires encounters a bunch of child vampires, who are constantly hungry, and not very discreet, which goes against the group rules. The children are so constantly hungry that Joey thinks they might be another species of vampire entirely, but this is eventually found not to be the case. Still, the vampires find themselves feeling sorry for the children, who they think were turned for pedophilic purposes, and feed them their own blood.
Obviously things are not quite what they seem, and the reader learns this as Joey does too.
I will say it’s a little slow to start, but it’s clearly building to something, and overall I loved The Lesser Dead. It was thoroughly creepy and unsettling. I will probably revisit it and it’s the strongest reason for revisiting The Necromancer’s House. I really can’t emphasize how good this book was. I listened to the audiobook, which Buehlman actually narrates and it’s outstanding. It was a fantastic experience and I can’t recommend it enough.
Warlight
Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight was one of the few books I physically read in 2019. I believe it came out in 2018 and was on the long list for The Booker Prize, for those of you who care about these things.
This was one of those books that was heartbreakingly beautiful and also so bittersweet and sad that I was devastated when it was over.
It follows 14 year old Nathaniel towards the end of the second world war in London. Nathaniel’s parents leave Nathaniel and his older sister, Rachel, in the care of their lodger while they go off for “work” in Singapore. The lodger, The Moth (actually named Walter), associates with an eccentric crowd that shapes the children’s lives during the postwar period.
Another acquaintance, ‘The Darter’ helps Nathaniel gain employment, where he meets and sleeps with Agnes (not her real name). After the year is up and their parents still haven’t returned, Nathaniel and Rachel begin to suspect that their mother is still in England, and Nathaniel begins to suspect he is being followed.
Nathaniel, Rachel, and Walter are eventually attacked by the men following Nathaniel, and when he and Rachel awaken, they’ve already been rescued, but Walter was killed. They briefly see their mother, who implies that giving up her children was part of “the deal” she made to keep them safe. Nathaniel and Rachel are then separated and rehomed.
In 1959, Nathaniel, now and adult, is working in the Foreign Office. He is part of a censorship effort regarding espionage activities towards the end of the war. Nathaniel is looking for the people from that part of his life, including his mother, which is part of his motivation for working in the Foreign Office. He spends the rest of the book looking for her and the people who so shaped his life as an adolescent.
This is one of those books that hints the past never really stays in the past, and that memory is a construct of the older, wiser self. The second part I admit I didn’t totally come up with on my own, I’m summarizing the reviews I read after the book. The first part I did, though! It’s also obviously a book about the lingering effects of war.
The book itself was beautifully written – the language is engaging and intricate, with many plot points more implied than revealed.
I really enjoyed this book even though it broke my heart. If you don’t like that kind of thing, don’t read it, but if you do…this is a good one.
The Grip of It
Jac Jemc’s The Grip of It was a psychological thriller/horror book that was favorably compared to the likes of The Haunting of Hill House and that’s mostly why I picked it. It wasn’t a bad book, exactly, it just…wasn’t as good as I hoped it would be, I guess.
Julie and James are a young married couple who move into a house “between the forest and the ocean” because they need to get away from the city where they lived. James is basically a gambling addict and unable to control himself, so they leave to “start over” in the country with no money. As someone raised on the east coast of the United States for my whole life, I LOL’d at this. Where did you get a house by the ocean you can afford with no money, exactly? Please let me know, I’d like to move there.
Anyway, after they move in, the weirdness cranks up. The cute (if old and in need of some cosmetic work) house they bought seems to start rotting from the inside out, with strange stains appearing on the walls and the water inexplicably contaminated with filth. I will say that Jemc does a good job of building atmosphere here. The language is good and the house is claustrophobic and undeniably creepy. There are rooms within rooms (hello, House of Leaves) and the feeling that the house is haunted pervades throughout the novel, with hauntings happening to everyone but very much centered on the main characters. In desperately searching for the source of the house’s unexplained decay and their increasing psychological and physical torment, we end up following the couple as they get to know their weird neighbors and search for information on the house’s mysterious previous owners.
There are two places Jemc falls short here, though, and they’re fairly major flaws: the couple themselves, Julie and James, are flat, boring, and what personality they do have is rather unlikeable. This is a pretty major flaw if you’re trying to get a reader to sympathize with them. The second place this novel fails is with the resolution, in that there is none. There’s an element in many psychological horror books that leaves a lot up to the reader, but this book has literally no resolution to anything. The couple just picks up and moves out of the house. I don’t know how they managed this with no money either, but when one of the narrator’s mysterious bruising matches the weird wall stains and you never get a clue as to why, common place mysteries like “how are you buying and selling homes with no money?” take a backseat.
I’d give this book 2.5 of 5 stars, if I was using a star rating. The atmosphere and language I enjoyed, but the characters and plot fell really flat.
The Fisherman
I picked up John Langan’s The Fisherman when I was living in Nyack, New York because it was in the “local interest” section of the Barnes & Noble in the Palisades Mall.
There aren’t a ton of horror novels that take place in upstate New York, but I found one.
It was pretty good.
The novel takes place over a course of three parts and is presented as a memoir of our narrator, Abe. In Part 1, ‘Men Without Women,’ Abe marries Marie who dies, about a year and a half after their marriage, of breast cancer. Abe is naturally devastated, but eventually pulls himself out of his depression and burgeoning alcoholism when he wakes up one day with a strong desire to go fishing. Fishing is how he eventually processes Marie’s death and is able to go back to work in a functioning manner.
As the years pass, one of Abe’s co-workers, Dan, also loses his wife and children. His wife and twin toddlers are killed instantly when they’re hit by an 18 wheeler that runs a stop sign. Abe strikes up a friendship of sorts with Dan, and they go fishing most weekends, sharing a bond of grief they don’t really speak about.
Eventually, Dan suggests they try a new fishing spot – Dutchman’s Creek in the Catskill mountains. On the way up, they get caught in a torrential rain and stop at a diner, where a short-order cook (a thinly disguised version of HP Lovecraft) hears their destination and advises them against going. Part 2 of the book – ‘Der Fischer’ – tells the history of Dutchman’s Creek. This is where the story gets really bizarre, in the way most horror stories are bizarre. Using the technique of a story within a story, we go from the present day to the early 20th century, where we are presented with a tale that includes zombies, an immortal sorcerer, water nymphs, a cursed grimoire, disgraced academics, a heroic fellowship of men, and last but certainly not least, an ancient primordial monster lurking below the waves of a vast, black ocean (leviathan).
Part 2 of the story takes up the most space but to me it was the most interesting part.
So, Abe and Dan decide to continue on to Dutchman’s Creek, in spite of the warnings of the short-order cook. This is a horror story, afterall. Part 3, ‘On the Shores of the Black Ocean,’ is where these two narratives converge and goes on to address the consequences afterwards. I won’t ruin it for you, as this is a pretty decent payoff and the book isn’t that old.
This is the sort of book that is about one thing but is really about something else. This book is a book about grief, and how people deal with it and go on to use it to continue their lives after a devastating loss. Abe uses his grief as a force to transform his life. Dan stews in his with a horrific result. It reminded me, in this sense, of the movie ‘The Babadook.’
I enjoyed this book, but I can see why not everyone would. It’s a character study as much as a horror novel, and it does have a rather slow build up and is very psychological in many ways. That said, I really enjoyed it, especially as I knew the local geography. I recommend it highly, if you like this kind of story. It was interesting, well done, and very suspenseful.
The Thursday Next Novel Series
Thursday Next is the protagonist of a book series I accidentally stumbled on 2019. I believe I bought One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde at an airport when I forgot my own book, not realizing it was part of a series. I enjoyed it in spite of being somewhat confused by it (I definitely remember reading it and in the middle having a moment of clarity where the entire story made sense).
Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series currently stand as such:
Series 1:
The Eyre Affair
Lost in a Good Book
The Well of Lost Plots
Something Rotten
Series 2 (so far):
First Among Sequels
One of Our Thursdays is Missing
The Woman Who Died A Lot
In 2019, I read/listened to four Thursday Next novels. The second novel of the second series, and the first three novels of the first series. The only reason I didn’t continue is that I couldn’t find the later books as audiobooks, although as I was writing this I went back to check and was able to borrow Something Rotten as an audiobook right away (and did so, will be listening to it after my current book).
I am sort of at a loss as where to begin “reviewing” the Thursday Next series, as the universe created around them is one of the most creative and complex I’ve read outside of high fantasy. The Thursday Next wikipedia page describes the stories as “comic fantasy, alternate history mystery novels” and that’s about as good a genre breakdown as you’re going to get.
Thursday herself is an engaging character, in her mid thirties and quite bright, working in the Literary Detective section. Literature is much more popular in Thursday’s world than ours, and much of the plot is centered around classic literature.
Fforde’s writing is full of wordplay – alliteration and puns abound – and he plays with traditional genres. There’s metafiction, fantasy, and parody. There are many, many literary references that made me grin. I quite enjoyed the novels and highly recommend them to all nerds who like literature and wordplay. I am pleasantly surprised to have Something Rotten on my audiobook shelf and look forward to trying to find the other books in the series.
Absolutely recommend.
The Wolf in the Attic
I picked up Paul Kearney’s The Wolf in the Attic by chance when I was in Barnes & Noble one day with my mom. I was attracted by the title which interested me, and by the blurb on the back which featured CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. They weren’t huge parts of the story but they did clearly inspire some of the setting and I appreciated that.
The story revolves around Anna Francis, a refugee of the Great War, in England from Greece, where her village was destroyed by (IIRC) the Ottomans. Her mother and brother were killed, and Anna and her father managed to make it to England, where Anna was bullied for being foreign so badly that she was eventually pulled out of school. Aside from her tutor, her only friend is her doll, Penelope, who Anna is aware is not real but is still acknowledged to be her best friend. Penelope is the only one Anna can talk about her homeland and her mother and brother with; her father does not want to talk about it. Her father has become involved with a political group of Greek ex-pats and has taken to heavy drinking.
With little else to do when not studying, Anna explores the house in which she lives and wanders the streets of Oxford and the surrounding countryside. She eventually meets a boy with yellow eyes in the attic and then his family in the woods – and her life takes quite the turn.
This was a historical fiction and fantasy book which I truly enjoyed, even though books like this aren’t usually my jam. Anna is a wonderful character, childlike but still smart and insightful, and her loneliness pervades the entire story. The writing was quite beautiful. I read part of the book on the train to and from New York City, and remember vividly looking out the window, startled to find I was on the Hudson River in New York, not in Oxfordshire.
The book’s ending suggested a sequel and I would not hesitate to read another of Kearney’s books, especially one featuring Anna. I absolutely look forward to this, although it will probably be even further down the line than this review as I have so many other books to read.
That said, The Wolf in the Attic was a wonderful story and I highly recommend it.
Pet Sematary
I didn’t do a lot of Stephen King in 2019, I suppose because I did so much of him in 2018. Pet Sematary is considered one of King’s “classics,” one of the novels everyone points to when no0bs ask where they should start with King.
I am pretty glad I didn’t start with Pet Sematary. This is where it gets a little strange with me. I thought Pet Sematary was really good, but I can’t exactly say that I liked it. I know, I know.
Let’s start with the most obvious thing I had trouble with in this novel: I’m not a big fan of animal deaths, no matter the type, even if it wasn’t horrible torture porn or anything like that. I’m that person who only cares if the dog dies. So there was an animal death in this book, which I didn’t love, but on the other hand the book is so old I knew the general plot and knew it was coming.
Then, there is the main character, Louis. Sigh. It’s not that he’s a bad character, or even particularly dislikeable but I personally tend to dislike characters/people who live in denial and lie to themselves. (No, I don’t have many friends in real life, how did you know?) Honestly, I have a lot of character flaws, but believing my own bullshit is not one of them. How many times do you have to do the same thing before you realize it’s not a good idea? Louis is one of those. How many times do you have to bury things in the ancient Indian burial ground before you figure out the outcome is not going to be better? At least one more, apparently.
There’s also the whole trope of the ancient Indian burial ground. The book came out in 1983 so things weren’t quite as enlightened then but I still probably wouldn’t use that trope today. That said, in this case it was a really effective use of the trope. I also think King may have played fast and loose with the geography of the Mi’kmaq people because while I think they are a tribe of the Northeastern Woodlands, I think most of their territory is in Canada, not as much in Maine. I looked this up when I read the book but it’s been a while. This is one of those things I’m willing to overlook while acknowledging it might be considered culturally insensitive. I also remember reading the Mi’kmaq had really interesting spiritual practices (nothing about cursed burial grounds), but that’s not really relevant.
Anyway, like I said, I enjoyed Pet Sematary but I can’t quite say that I liked it. It is definitely one of King’s best novels, and an excellent place to start with his books. Highly recommended.
words in scarlet ink 