To quote perhaps the best book review ever written, and certainly the pithiest: “the covers of this book are too far apart.”
I’m not sure what the rules here are on reviewing DNFs, because I make it a point of (foolish, stubborn) pride to finish everything I start. But this book just wore me down with it’s discursive nature, the episodic structure of the plot, and the tedious footnotes which ceased being funny long before the author realized it. I suppose, given the sales, that there are many people who find these little eccentricities charming, but I confess that for me they were the exact opposite.
The title characters are both English magicians living in England during the Napoleonic Era. The elder, Mr. Norrell, is a cantankerous bookworm protective of the legacy of English magic. He goes so far as to try to make himself the only magician in England in order to best preserve the form. Jonathan Strange is an idler who stumbles into the profession only after his fiancee demands he find one. He turns out to be a natural talent, infuriating Mr. Norrell, who nonetheless is forced to form an uneasy alliance with him to use magic to aid England in the wars against France.
That sounds like a promising premise for a novel, and indeed, that is what hooked me when I purchased this door-stopper. I must give credit to the marketing team at Amazon, who managed to completely avoid using the word “fairies” in their summation of this novel that is chock-full of them. Now, if you like reading fairies I won’t judge you, but that’s not what I was looking for and just one use of the word could have saved me a lot of pain and suffering.
This book just would not move for me. I would read for what felt like forever and my Kindle would let me know just how little progress I had actually made. I began groaning every time two characters started a conversation, knowing it would go on for several pages longer than it had to. Or when I clicked on one of Clarke’s precious footnotes to find a pages-long anecdote totally unconnected to the narrative.
Ugh, what a way to close out the year in reading.
