With Prejudice and Without Pride: Susanna Clarke’s Jonathon Strange & Mr Norrell
What have I been upto of late?
Well, apart from the usual reams of proofs to check and copy-edit corrections to make in my several different editions of various books of the Ramayana, working on my Mahabharata, and putting a few last-minute touches to King of Ayodhya before sending it off for good, I’ve been listening to a lot of classic rock (The Who rocks, majorly) and the usual mix of classical, hip hop and Punjabi rap (Bombay Rockers are cool), found time to see Million Dollar Baby (a simple, straight, human drama that doesn’t promise any pyrotechnics and delivers none), Meet The Fockers (vulgarly entertaining in parts, the CGI baby was the highlight with his baby signs and ‘first word’), and the whole Season 1 of The O.C. on DVD, the very enjoyable new teen soap that’s replaced Dawson’s Creek for my 12-year old daughter.
One thing I’ve been careful not to do on this blog is use it as a forum to pontificate on current events. There are any number of self-serving columnists in the daily rags to do that. I don’t intend to participate in the Page 1 culture, even to the extent of commenting on it, because, frankly, commenting on it is participating.
Don’t be fooled by the journalists who insist they’re ‘against’ Page 3 culture and spend reams of newsprint criticizing celebs and Page 3 people – as they say in advertising, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Those very journalists, by criticizing and attacking Page 3 people, have created their own monster sub-genre, the Page 1 culture. Wherein they take subjects that even Page 3 journalists would have hesitated to touch with a barge pole and splash it all over Page 1 under the guise of ‘news’. In this category, I’d include trashnews like the Delhi schoolboy-MMS scandal, the Kareena-Shahid alleged kiss in a restobar, the recent ‘casting couch sting operation’ fiasco, and a horde of other stuff that, twenty years ago, wouldn’t have found space in the gossip columns of most trashy film mags.
It’s gotten so bad that when I look at the latest sensational front page news these days, I have to ask myself, who are they really addressing this news to? Not us ordinary newsreaders surely, so it must be their colleagues who write for Page 3. It’s a war of the Roses, and it doesn’t smell sweet.
Someday, someone needs to conduct a sting operation on the news media itself, and expose the sordid corruption, power politicking and other inside horrors that go on in this secret world. I might have a few interesting revelations to make about it myself. In fact, I even have an unfinished novel, a sort-of sequel to Vertigo entitled Under A Neon Sky, which is set in this very grimy world of the Indian media, and deals in part with the rise of the Page 3 culture.
But that’s a story for another day.
For now, I’m going to do what I love most, post another review of a book. This one’s also from my Hindustan Times reviews cache, but after the book’s made waves everywhere, I thought it might be interesting to post my review here, to give you the other side of the story.
Enjoy…the review, if not the book itself!
(And despite saying I would not comment, even to criticize, I ended up making a few comments anyway, didn’t I? Ah, as they say, you can de-tongue, muzzle, hog-tie, and thrash an old columnist till he’s died nine times over, but you can’t make his fingers stop typing! Now you know why, in my heyday, I was called the most outspoken columnist in the country – I wouldn’t hesitate to criticize even my colleagues, or even my own editor: no wonder I didn’t get paid half the time!)
Jane Austen is Alive and Well, and Writing Fantasy
Jane Austen died and came back as a fantasy writer. In her new avatar, she calls herself Susanna Clarke, lives in Cambridge, and has authored a fat historical fantasy novel set in the year 1860. The book, which she now calls her “debut”, began attracting media attention long before publication and on release it’s been universally lauded. Unlike her previous avatar, the 21st century Ms Clarke (nee Austen) seems to be enjoying the attention showered upon her and far from publishing her first book under a pseudonym, has been a central performer at her own media circus.
The book itself has been called, by a media ever eager to summarize even 800-page hardcover tomes into a snappy catchphrase, “Harry Potter for adults”. It’s also been praised by perhaps the best living author of British fantasy novels (though he’s now moved to the USA), Neil Gaiman, “Unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the past seventy years.”
It helps that it’s published by Bloomsbury, the very people who bought and believed in the maiden effort of a certain Joanna Rowling not many years past and who were then stamped with the label of the “world’s biggest fantasy publisher” on the strength of that Hogwartian breakthrough. At first appearance, this book would seem to have everything to recommend it: a great publisher, a promising new author (who spent an alleged ten years on the book), a beautifully produced book design (the white covers were restricted to only the first 40,000 copies, so if you get one, know that it’s a collector’s item), and a book that seems perfect in every respect.
So you really want to like this book. Love it in fact. Especially if fat fantasy tomes are your buzz-biz. And discovering a great new author gives you the kind of kick that television viewers must get everytime a new ‘KKK’ serial goes on air. So you settle into a cosy sofa, or your favourite ergonomically designed seating, and crack the spine.
And that’s where the castle in the air falls to smoky shards. Crumbles into vapour. Vanishes with the suddenness of yet another overhyped media celebrity after her 15 nanoseconds of frame.
Here’s the story behind the headlines. JS & Mr N is a boring, dreary and unimaginative novel of manners, not magic. Unimaginative? Yes. Believe it or not, there’s less imagination and originality displayed in these almost-800 large pages than in ten pages of a Harry Potter novel–and I’m not even a Harry Potter fan!
The story is easily enough summed up: In an England where magic is studied but no longer practised, two practising magicians appear, aid their country in the war against Napolean, and generally change society forever. It’s an interesting enough premise and one that you expect something dazzling of, perhaps even a clever fantasy take on War and Peace or Dickens with dragons. Anything but the dull and plodding monstrosity that it actually turns out to be.
The novel is written in an impeccably manicured faux-Victorian prose straight out of the pages of an Austen novel of manners. And that’s exactly what it is: a novel of manners, not magic. The characters parade about much like characters in an Austen novel, with great emphasis on how a person dresses, speaks and which parties he or she attends (or doesn’t) but without the genial, deceptively incisive Austen insight into hearts and minds that makes her simplicity so profound even today. There’s a super-abundance of stiff, English-backed male characters who disembark from horse-carriages and tug on bellpulls to call for their valets, with the usual disregard for well-drawn women characters (extremely odd in a novel written by a 21st century woman author) and even the obligatory repitition of numerous stereotypes and social slurs of the period, all, presumably, to convey historical accuracy.
This is perhaps the one thing that Clarke does get right: accuracy. She recreates the English novel of the period with pitch-perfect detail. This is the novel’s greatest strength–and failing. If you love utterly “English” novels, then you’ll be in heaven. If you haven’t read much literature since 1860, the period in the which the novel begins, then you’ve got a great treat in store. But if you’ve managed to imbibe something of world literature after the death of Napolean, then you’ll be left scratching your head and wondering at the lack of psychological insight, the completely bereft inner lives of the characters, the tepid and hesitant story that develops–lacking the subtle but certain iron-fist-in-velvet-glove surety of an Austen, the character depth and symbolic beauty of a James, and quite definitely the raucous emotional drama of a Dickens.
On the fantasy front, the book falls woefully short in every respect. The footnotes, virtually a novel within a novel, are cleverly done but have been done before far more effectively–check out Mark Danielswki’s brilliant dark literary fantasy House of Leaves. The attempt to combine realistic English settings with imaginative elements has been done far more effectively by writers like Tim Powers, Graham Joyce, Christopher Priest, and even Gaiman himself. The fantasy elements, while nicely done, are ultimately quite ordinary and lacking ambition. The historical period, while brilliantly recreated, stands like a beautiful set upon which no truly worthy drama is played out. Unlike, say, the well-deserved Booker winner, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, this novel doesn’t even aspire to re-visit a period of history in order to better illuminate some new aspect of the human condition. In fact, to pursue the unlikely comparison, Line of Beauty is a far more entertaining and rewarding book.
On the plus side, Clarke’s wit is brilliant–she writes marvelously elegant prose. The book is immensely readable and not entirely without its charms. If beautiful writing, wit, and a perfectly achieved mimicry of the 19th century novel of manners were all this novel claimed to be, you could even forgive it its hype. A great novel of the fantastic it certainly isn’t.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 23rd, 2005 at 7:51 am. It is filed under Ashok.
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