Michael Alec Rose

FictionShort Stories

Twin tales of the cozy and carnal

Review by Michael Alec Rose

“But my brother Esau is an hairy man, and I am a smooth man.” Expounding in nasal tones upon this Biblical verse and forever consigning it to comedy scripture, Alan Bennett began his career in the now-legendary British troupe Beyond the Fringe. Fifty years on, Bennett still doesn’t miss a trick as our most reliable bloodhound of the absurd in everyday life. In Smut, his latest collection, Bennett’s comic vision reaches Shakespearean heights of melancholy—a communion of disillusionment and laughter, of disgruntlement and euphoria, that is peculiarly British. The pleasures for the reader are sheer gruntlement.

The heroines of these two stories earn our affection by virtue (!) of their foolish trust in other human beings, which ultimately grants them inadvertent rewards. There is an old-fashioned name for the little miracles vouchsafed to these ladies: it used to be called grace. In “The Greening of Mrs Donaldson” and “The Shielding of Mrs Forbes,” however, no whiff of theological election attaches to their condition. Rather, what motivates their spiritual ascents (the Catholic term “assumption” is too good to be true) is the naïve principle working within their natures and motivating the sublimely sad hilarity of their tales.

If Mrs Donaldson does not adequately reckon the psychological cost of providing free rent in her house to young couples in return for voyeuristic delights, or if Mrs Forbes never once suspects the remarkable sexual deviancies of various family members going on right under her prim nose, that’s literally not their lookout. The perpetrators of said sordid designs upon Mrs D. and Mrs F. alchemically transform into bestowers of unaccountable harmony. The “smut” of the book’s title morphs into a “must.” Shakespeare’s Puck could not have managed it so well. In company with that good fellow, Alan Bennett shall restore amends.

“But my brother Esau is an hairy man, and I am a smooth man.” Expounding in nasal tones upon this Biblical verse and forever consigning it to comedy scripture, Alan Bennett began his career in the now-legendary British troupe Beyond the Fringe. Fifty years on,…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Music and murder in action

Review by Michael Alec Rose

Good songwriter that he is (under the alias John Wesley Harding), Wesley Stace knows the emotional value of repetition. Just as the melodic “hook” keeps the listener listening, the narrative “hook” keeps the reader reading. The more the composer (or author) varies that same little bit of tuneful (or eventful) stuff, new regions of expression arise out of telling the same story over and over again.

The musical principle of repetition saturates every aspect of Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer, from its characterization to its structure. Charles Jessold is introduced to us as a gifted composer and the bright hope of English music in the early 20th century. His more fateful and titular role, however, is to reincarnate Carlo (Charles) Gesualdo (Jessold), the brilliant and infamous 16th century Italian composer, who caught and murdered his wife and her lover in bed. Thanks to Stace’s supple blurring of fact and wild invention, it makes no difference that Gesualdo is “historical” and Jessold “fictional”: both figures take one and the same imaginative shape as avatars (two among so many) of a certain great folk song, in which a Lord kills his Lady and her lover over the course of dozens of heartbreakingly repetitive stanzas.

The novel itself takes shape as a tour de forceof musical redundancy. The music critic Leslie Shepherd—Jessold’s friend and champion—first gives an “exposition” of the facts of the composer’s rise and fall, right up to the horrible night of Jessold’s double murder and suicide, on the eve of his operatic debut. Then, with astonishing fortitude, Shepherd presents a broader “recapitulation” of the entire story, this time told in the darker, more tragic key of Shepherd’s own life, and (even more tellingly) of Shepherd’s own wife. To say any more would betray the abiding spirit of folk song, which demands that we repeat, not reveal. Read this book. I’ll say it again: read this book.

Good songwriter that he is (under the alias John Wesley Harding), Wesley Stace knows the emotional value of repetition. Just as the melodic “hook” keeps the listener listening, the narrative “hook” keeps the reader reading. The more the composer (or author) varies that same little…

Fiction

Imagining our future selves

Review by Michael Alec Rose

In the history of socially conscious fiction, the shift from the realism of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Hard Times to the speculation of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 reflects the growing difficulty of the moral imagination to keep pace with techno-political advances. This acceleration is dramatically evident in the debate over human cloning, which could now—if made legal—be accomplished through a relatively uncomplicated medical procedure. Could the manufacture of a cloned person ever be politically (if not ethically) sanctioned? If so, could cloning be undertaken through governmental control? These questions are no longer the stuff of science fiction, but the substance of academic debate. Political implementation never lurks far behind.

And so, Steven Polansky’s fable of a man who meets his own clone—a creature processed under a classified U.S. government cloning program for the purposes of organ harvesting (for those citizens who can afford to pay for it)—may be projected as vintage 2071, but there is no reason why the unnerving scenario could not happen in our own lifetime, as so much else has.

The title of The Bradbury Report is a tribute to the author of 451. “Ray Bradbury” is the pseudonym of the narrator, an old, disappointed and dying man, through whom Polansky plays an age-old literary trick: The teller has no muse inspiring him to speak, but only an absolute necessity to bear witness to the horror he has experienced (behold the Ancient Mariner).

Artless as the narrator pretends to be, there are passages here that stand unsurpassed in the catalogue of speculative fiction for pure, shattering pathos. The existential quandary of Samuel Beckett’s characters cannot hold a candle to the cosmic despair of Alan, the clone, when he discovers who—or rather, what—he is. Just as in Beecher Stowe, Dickens, Orwell—and yes, Bradbury—Polansky’s outrage against human arrogance and cruelty is overwhelming, all the more so because the suffering human being in this case has no existence at all, apart from that which human arrogance and cruelty have bestowed upon him. The Bradbury Report shows us supremely well that to be human is to weep, and to weep is to be drawn in the first place from the womb, and no place else.

In the history of socially conscious fiction, the shift from the realism of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Hard Times to the speculation of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 reflects the growing difficulty of the moral imagination to keep pace with techno-political advances. This acceleration is dramatically…

FictionHorror

One woman’s long strange trip in search of her true identity

Review by Michael Alec Rose

There is a genre of fiction that might well be called “tourism horror.” In such stories, the protagonist travels to a breathtakingly attractive destination, where all hell breaks loose. The masterpieces of the genre are surely Dracula (oh, Transylvania!) and The Shining (talk about a “last resort” hotel). Enter debut novelist Wendy Webb, who gives both Bram Stoker and Stephen King a run for their travel budget, inventing an island in the Great Lakes that can’t be matched for pristine natural beauty, richness of history, touristic amenities . . . and sheer supernatural terror.

One reason why The Tale of Halcyon Crane deserves a place in the canon of tourism horror is its initial twist of the emotional knife: the traumatic discovery that forces our heroine, Hallie James, to make her journey to Great Manitou Island. Ghosts, violent death, witches—none of these terrible presences on the island hold a frightful candle to the psychological devastation at the outset of the novel, when Hallie finds out that she is not the person she thought she was—and neither is her father, nor her mother, nor anything she has ever believed about her family. This internal horror outdistances the merely external threats imposed by Stoker and King.

The emotional impact of the island’s heart of darkness on Webb’s heroine also stands in complete contrast to the way things usually go in the genre. In Dracula and The Shining (or Heart of Darkness, for that matter), the hero or heroine is possessed by the horror, is undone by it and made monstrous. But in The Tale of Halcyon Crane, Hallie James confronts the horror and takes possession of herself, entering into her authentic identity, with all its difficulties intact.

The novel’s affirmative spirit may not be to the taste of diehard horror fans, but it certainly gives a more generous account of how the spirit of a beautiful place can complexly affect a human being, for both good and ill. Wendy Webb is a professional journalist, first and foremost. Like those journalistic masters Dickens and Twain before her, she knows that to write good travel prose, you must give a vivid account of both the demons you find along the way and the demons you bring along with you. That way, the reader always feels right at home.

Michael Alec Rose is a composer who teaches at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.

There is a genre of fiction that might well be called “tourism horror.” In such stories, the protagonist travels to a breathtakingly attractive destination, where all hell breaks loose. The masterpieces of the genre are surely Dracula (oh, Transylvania!) and The Shining (talk about a…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Revenge and redemption

Review by Michael Alec Rose

Too much historical fiction relies on the tragedy of history’s grand sweep overwhelming little lives. Instead, Robert Goddard flips the switch and subordinates historical events to the fates of his protagonists in Long Time Coming. Governments and armies may determine history; but Goddard keeps firmly in our minds that it is individuals who suffer and occasionally even survive it. Humphrey Bogart’s famously ironic “hill of beans” line in Casablanca comes to mind. Goddard’s heroes and villains in Long Time Coming may not be quite as colorful in their parting shots, but they are every bit as compelling.

In this case, the war is World War II, the place London (and later, Antwerp), the time shifting between 1940 and 1976. Two disturbing historical facts set the scene: First, Ireland remained stubbornly neutral during the war; and second, in the years leading up to the war, a handful of Belgian merchants—mainly Jewish—made a killing (the wording is, alas, all too accurate) from the brutal diamond mines in the Congo. The historical data in question would be easy fodder for (respectively) anti-Irish sentiment and anti-Semitism, as they are at certain points in this novel. But the author refuses to make his complex case pliable to any straightforward ethical assessment. Goddard cares only for how this particular person experiences this crisis and is transformed or destroyed by it, according to character and luck.

The Englishman Eldritch Swan—long thought dead—spent 36 years in an Irish prison. Now he and his nephew Stephen must find proof that a set of Picassos was forged. Why is this eccentric undertaking so crucial? How do private passions give meaning to the enormities of history? Shakespeare knew the answer. So did Dickens and Conrad. Now the knowledge has passed to fearless weavers of intimate histories like Robert Goddard. 

Too much historical fiction relies on the tragedy of history’s grand sweep overwhelming little lives. Instead, Robert Goddard flips the switch and subordinates historical events to the fates of his protagonists in Long Time Coming. Governments and armies may determine history; but Goddard keeps firmly…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Simmons imagines the story behind Dickens’ lost work

Review by Michael Alec Rose

If you’re making lists of classic science fiction, horror, fantasy, mystery and historical fiction, works by Ray Bradbury and Dan Simmons must appear on every one. Only these two authors have had the skill and the nerve to excel in every one of these genres. But there is more to the Bradbury-Simmons connection than mere range. What binds them together most poignantly is their fierce love and explicit regard for the literary tradition. For instance, Charles Dickens often haunts Bradbury’s works. Now it is Simmons’ turn to raise the ghost of the creator of Ebenezer Scrooge, Oliver Twist and, of course, Edwin Drood.

In Drood, Dickens is ironically overshadowed by his close friend and collaborator Wilkie Collins, the brilliant but lesser-known mystery novelist. Collins narrates a detailed, “revisionist” account of Dickens’ final years after his near-fatal railway accident in 1865. Through the voice of Dickens’ jealous friend, Simmons manages to fuse all his genres, and then some. Drood is at once an intimate view of the amours of two beloved Victorian writers, an extensive and meticulously researched piece of English historical fiction, a fantasy of doppelgangers and Egyptian rites, a quaint exercise in 19th-century science fiction (including mesmeric trances and the technology of London sewage), a dark and bloody detective story, a novel of purest horror (with brain-eating beetles and walking Undead), and the latest in a long line of impossible efforts to finish Dickens’ last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Simmons’ splendid pastiche is all the more engaging because we can never really know why Dickens was inspired to make such a radical departure in his final work, let alone how he would have completed it had he lived.  Drood will shock and delight readers as a plausible Amadeus fable: the mediocre artist (Collins/Salieri) spirals into a murderous rage against his nemesis, the Inimitable Genius (Dickens/Mozart), whose greatness only he is close enough to fully understand and articulate. There’s only one flaw in the Amadeus model, and it’s a decisive one: in real life, both Salieri and Collins produced genuinely beautiful work. Simmons’ self-evident hope for his wildly macabre Drood is that it will lead a new flock of readers to Collins’ wonderful Woman in White and Moonstone.

Michael Alec Rose is a composer and Vanderbilt University music professor who owes his lifelong love of literature to Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.

If you’re making lists of classic science fiction, horror, fantasy, mystery and historical fiction, works by Ray Bradbury and Dan Simmons must appear on every one. Only these two authors have had the skill and the nerve to excel in every one of these genres.…

FictionWorld Fiction

A little-known classic

Review by Michael Alec Rose

Walter de la Mare’s fiction from between the World Wars has long been lost in a lonely, twilight world of half-obscurity. Such a literary fate is somewhat ironic, for his stories and novels consistently depict a lonely, twilight world of half-obscurity—the most haunting of all being the unsettling universe of diminutive Miss M., the midget-heroine-narrator of what surely must be de la Mare’s finest novel.

For the handful of de la Mare’s aficionados in England and the U.S., the reappearance of Memoirs of a Midget 88 years after its first publication will come as both a vindication of his enduring genius and a cause for some alarm. After all, what will a 21st-century readership make of dear old Walter’s art? Will his prose, like a living mosquito caught in the gorgeous amber of Henry James and Marcel Proust, still be able to buzz off the page and bite deep into a reader’s conscience?

As with James and Proust, a central thrill of reading Memoirs belongs to the moment of surrender. In the first chapter or two, the question looms in the reader’s mind: how far am I willing to submit to the discomfiting dream-language of little Miss M., who tells her peculiar life story through prose infused with wonder and wisdom, as well as magnificent emotional detail? But as the pages turn, the revelation comes, and the fearful odyssey of a midget in a full-sized world rings increasingly true as the perfect expression of what every human being—regardless of size—feels throughout life, as both child and adult: that the world does not fit, that we were not meant for it, that every act of love we tender towards the world is met with misunderstanding and rebuff. It is a terrible epiphany, but one whose redemption is the heroic presence of an angel such as Miss M. who can record all these evils of spiritual misalignment.

Michael Alec Rose is a composer who teaches at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.

Walter de la Mare’s fiction from between the World Wars has long been lost in a lonely, twilight world of half-obscurity. Such a literary fate is somewhat ironic, for his stories and novels consistently depict a lonely, twilight world of half-obscurity—the most haunting of all…

Fiction

A literary rabble-rouser shifts his focus

Review by Michael Alec Rose

In the world of letters, Nicholson Baker is our Shakespearean fool, our Old Testament prophet. He makes a brilliant ass of himself (or of his fictional characters) in order to speak hard truths and expose the intrinsic insanity of our civilization. His unruly achievement from last year, Human Smoke, asserted that the political “heroes” of World War II (Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, above all) were, in fact, diabolical rogues. Checkpoint (from 2004) took the form of a fictional dialogue about a plan to assassinate President Bush. And in 2001’s Double Fold, Baker exposed the scandalous campaign of libraries to destroy their paper materials to make way for electronic resources. 

As with the fool and the prophet, Baker’s relentless ax- grinding leaves a lasting impression because of the sustained glories of his language. He knows that all he can do in the face of limitless human folly is to sing a memorable song. The fool and the prophet are not pundits or politicians: they are poets. And so, at last, in The Anthologist, Baker has turned to poetry, the true home of his radicalism. In its own way, this new novel is bound to cause an uncomfortable stir in literary circles, just as his previous three books have.

The protagonist—the almost-but-not-quite Poet Laureate Paul Chowder—is, like Baker, a champion of unfashionable or outrageous ideas. In Chowder’s case, the lost cause is the poem that actually rhymes, in an era when free verse reigns. While procrastinating from writing an overdue introduction to his anthology of rhyming verse, Chowder gives rein to lyrical confessions about his own failures as a poet and lover and an assortment of critiques on various other poets. The meaner Chowder gets, the funnier he gets. The funnier he gets, the more heartbreaking becomes his predicament: he is a poet past his prime, with nothing to show but an abiding affection for what he loves. At last, Chowder realizes that what he’s been doing all along is composing his introduction. The rest is poetry. Baker’s beautifully vexed and inviting novel throws open those magic casements and we are all the luckier for it. 

Michael Alec Rose is a composer who teaches at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.

 

 

In the world of letters, Nicholson Baker is our Shakespearean fool, our Old Testament prophet. He makes a brilliant ass of himself (or of his fictional characters) in order to speak hard truths and expose the intrinsic insanity of our civilization. His unruly achievement from…

FictionHorror

Classic inspiration for spine-tingling chills

Review by Michael Alec Rose

John Harwood's second novel ought to be read aloud, through the reek of cigar smoke, port wine, yuletide logs and leather bindings. The Seance, like its predecessor The Ghost Writer, takes up the bookish thread of classic British supernatural fiction as if it had never been cut by modernity. Fortunately, Harwood writes so well that an uninitiated reader can perfectly enjoy his tale of atmospheric mystery and dread without catching all the gothic and Victorian allusions. With the right key, however, The Seance offers a first-rate passport into the strange and chilling realm of literature where Harwood plays and with such postmodern abandon.

And so, dear reader, here is a brief inventory of The Seance's sources—a whirlwind tour of the book's ingenious exploitation of the genre's traditional plot devices. If you decide to investigate the original works, please proceed with care. Once you cross this threshold, any possibility of real ghosts will pale by comparison to the genuine terrors of these imagined ones:

1.) An uncanny piece of armor inspires mortal fear (Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto).

2.) A young woman is threatened in an isolated house by an evil tormentor (Matthew Lewis' The Monk, Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho).

3.) A bizarre and blasphemous electrical experiment wreaks havoc (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein).

4.) A man deranged by love for his wife exploits her special condition to explore the permeable boundary between life and death (Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher).

5.) The legal matter of a strange bequest leads our heroine on a dangerous path of self-discovery (Mrs. Riddell, passim).

6.) A dark and charming man of great intelligence and cruelty seduces a beautiful woman in order to feed his desire for immortality (Bram Stoker, Dracula).

The catalogue of references could continue with a social history of spiritualism in the late Victorian period and arrive at last at the great ghost stories of Montague Rhodes James, the point from which Harwood launched his debut novel. It is a scary and joyful ride. Hold on tight. The horses are about to run wild through the dark wood.

John Harwood's second novel ought to be read aloud, through the reek of cigar smoke, port wine, yuletide logs and leather bindings. The Seance, like its predecessor The Ghost Writer, takes up the bookish thread of classic British supernatural fiction as if it had never…

FictionHorrorClassics

Books to make you shiver

Review by Michael Alec Rose

Leslie S. Klinger's great virtue as an editor is his sublimely willful and scrupulous disregard for the boundary between historical fact and literary falsehood. In The New Annotated Dracula, he reprises the same "gentle fiction" (as he calls it) of his earlier annotated Sherlock Holmes, treating Stoker's novel as nonfiction: real events happening to real persons.

After a brief preface in which he explains his trick, Klinger's edition becomes a surreal treat, exploiting the "real-life" flavor of the book's succession of journal entries and letters. The horror of Stoker's deathless chronicle radiates into the margins, where Klinger's copious and deadpan efforts to elucidate the narrative's context and complexity ring with the authority of a Talmudic commentary on this unholiest of scriptures.

So many commentators on Dracula (whom Klinger, with his comprehensive knowledge of the literature, gratefully cites) have marveled over and tried to explain the book's peculiar power and endurance in our culture, all the more bewildering in light of its author's absolute mediocrity in every one of his other publications. For the subsequent history of horror fiction, one of the most influential aspects of Stoker's work must be its thrilling psychological insight into our fear of the Other.

COLLECTING THE GENRE'S BEST
The undisputed king of pulp fiction, Robert E. Howard spawned far too many inferior imitators—that is to say, almost every teenaged, middle-class American boy throughout the latter decades of the 20th century. This was the dreadful literary legacy Peter Straub had to overcome when he and his fellow horror writers of higher, Edgar-Allan-Poetic ambition took the field about 25 years ago.

Poe's Children: The New Horror celebrates their collective achievement. "Literary horror" may be an oxymoron, but Straub & co. have the stalwart heart—and the creeping heartlessness—to care not a whit. In composing the dooms of their hapless characters in such memorable cadences, the authors in this anthology thumb noses and other bleeding appendages at all the nabobs of the literary establishment who would consign horror fiction forever to the hell of the genre shelves. The works of Elizabeth Hand, Kelly Link, Jonathan Carroll, the incomparable John Crowley and the terrific new kid on the block Joe Hill (who comes right after his dad Stephen King in this collection), prove that the very worst things imaginable invariably demand the very best style in the telling of them.

Straub complains bitterly in his introduction about publishers who will do anything to sell their new horror books, including the unforgivable sin of placing clich

HOWARD'S GRISLY TALES OF HORROR
The beloved American writer Robert E. Howard ran amok with the theme of "the other" in his many horror stories of the 1930s, gathered in The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard, the latest installment in the Robert E. Howard Library from Del Rey, with startling illustrations by graphic artist Greg Staples. Inspired by his matchless contemporary H.P. Lovecraft, Howard created an entire cosmology of a horrific Outside impinging upon our world, waiting for our merest transgression to come hurtling through to kill us, or worse, torment us for eternity. We can never know for sure the reasons for his suicide in 1936, but it surely cannot have been easy for Howard to live in a universe crowded with horrors he believed in with enough conviction to body them forth with ghastly imaginative force, in tale after grisly tale.

Leslie S. Klinger's great virtue as an editor is his sublimely willful and scrupulous disregard for the boundary between historical fact and literary falsehood. In The New Annotated Dracula, he reprises the same "gentle fiction" (as he calls it) of his earlier annotated Sherlock Holmes,…

FictionHistorical Fiction

The bard, brought to life again

Review by Michael Alec Rose

What does it feel like to be seized body and soul by sudden fear or desire? To steal power, submit to power, relinquish power? To tumble for the first time with the love of your life? To mourn a father? Lose a child? Betray someone's trust, or have yours betrayed? Or, finally, to be able to acknowledge your own hunger, your own mortality, your insatiable lust for living?William Shakespeare answers these questions again and again, in play after play, always with stupendous insight. The Bard shows us the human being exactly as it lives and suffers and rejoices, under ever – familiar circumstances, however dramatically enhanced. To be so well – versed in humanity, Shakespeare must have been one hell of a human being – or not, but such a contradiction would only intensify the mystery. That's why it's so tantalizing to have so few scraps of evidence about what sort of person dear old Will really was.

To British author Christopher Rush, these scraps – along with the plays and poems themselves, which he taught for 30 years – are all the stuff he needs to perform his own feat of Shakespearean magic. Just as Will summons into thrilling reality hunchbacked Richard, ill – used Othello and fat Falstaff, Rush brings to startling life Shakespeare himself – or rather, "brings to death," for the pages of Will are spoken by Will himself, on his deathbed, consigning his final will to his lawyer. Above all, it is the sheer chutzpah of Rush's enterprise – the detailing of Shakespeare's life and work from Shakespeare's own mouth, from before the cradle to beyond the grave – that elevates his story into its authentic globe, where the ultimate human heart is revealed. Here's the rare rendering of an artist in which art is not reduced by biography, but enlarged by it; where sex and death are not the caricatured obsessions of the poet, but his boundless and worthy themes. But take warning, reader: the London of the Elizabethan Age is rough trade, the theatre lying hard by the whorehouse and execution ground. Christopher Rush gives it all to us with uncensored glee and unfeigned horror.

Michael Alec Rose is a professor at Vanderbilt University's Blair School of Music.

What does it feel like to be seized body and soul by sudden fear or desire? To steal power, submit to power, relinquish power? To tumble for the first time with the love of your life? To mourn a father? Lose a child? Betray someone's…

Science Fiction & FantasyShort Stories

The magical world of Susanna Clarke

Review by Michael Alec Rose

Susanna Clarke's magnificent 2004 debut novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, marked the culmination of nearly a decade of authorial journeywork. Short pieces published variously through those years laid the groundwork for the novel's alternative history of a magic-ridden England, and these have now been collected in The Ladies of Grace Adieu.

As this reviewer commented when it first appeared, Clarke's 800-page novel weirdly seemed to be too short, bursting at the seams with an energy that cannot properly be contained by her history of Strange and Norrell, the two greatest magicians of the Napoleonic era. Footnote after thrilling footnote in the novel tantalizes the reader with glimpses of further stories about the realm of Faerie, the whole mass of which could never dispel its fearful mystery and fatal charm. It is a testament to Clarke's boundless generosity that she has now, in this collection, unpacked a number of such footnotes, delivering them as full-length stories a set of eight and granting us a view of both the sources and the essence of her invention.

Clarke's prose traverses an uncanny corridor between the scholar's desk and the fairy's hidey-hole. In the spirit of Tolkien's studious approach to the history of elves and goblins and with something of M.R. James's donnish humor when it comes to charnel horrors Clarke introduces the fantastical, twilight world of magic as scholarship. She even goes so far as to invent an academic discipline: Sidhe, fairy studies, which one apparently can major in at the University of Aberdeen. Though the saga of Strange and Norrell had little to say about lady-magicians, sorceresses conspire companionably here, and to their hearts' content, most notably in the title story.

Grace Adieu is the name of a fictitious English village, but in Clarke's landscape, it could also be a likely form of address. Hell hath no fury like a lady doing magic. If you cross her, you might as well bid grace adieu.

 

Michael Alec Rose is a professor of music at Vanderbilt University.

Susanna Clarke's magnificent 2004 debut novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, marked the culmination of nearly a decade of authorial journeywork. Short pieces published variously through those years laid the groundwork for the novel's alternative history of a magic-ridden England, and these have now been…

Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

The magic of a spell-binding debut

Review by Michael Alec Rose

What kind of magic can make a nearly 800-page novel seem too short? Whatever it is, debut author Susanna Clarke is possessed by it, and her astonished readers will surely hope she never recovers. Her epic history of an alternative, magical England is so beautifully realized that not one of the many enchantments Clarke chronicles in the book could ever be as potent or as quickening as her own magnificent narrative.

It is 1806, and Gilbert Norrell is the only true magician in England. He sets out to restore the practice of magic to a nation that has not seen it for more than 300 years. But there is an odd and fateful twist to Norrell's character: he is as scholarly and insufferably pedantic as he is gifted. In short, Norrell is the most boring and unmagical person imaginable. This is Clarke's masterstroke, the necessary touch of ordinary candleshine in the midst of all the uncanny fairy light she dispenses.

Enter Jonathan Strange, the intuitive magician the natural who can improvise in a flash what Norrell has gleaned from long study. Strange becomes Norrell's pupil, but soon the tension between their styles mounts to a breaking point. The two men realize that they have a fundamental disagreement about how to approach the mysterious and terrifying sources of English magic, in the face of which even Albus Dumbledore might find himself unnerved.

Just as Norrell and Strange apprentice themselves to a Golden Age of medieval magicians, Clarke tethers her craft to the great 19th-century English masters of the novel, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. The book offers not only an Austen-like inquiry into the fine human line between ridiculous flaw and serious consequence, but also a Dickensian flow of language in which a comical surplus of detail rings at last with certain and inevitable significance. This elixir of literary influences gives the story its delightful texture. But there is so much more to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell—an energy buckling and straining at the edges of the book in sheer imaginative overflow, just as the realm of Faerie buckles and strains beyond the edges of England's green fields, beckoning us down the overgrown path and through the dark wood. Thus it happens that a novel of nearly 800 pages seems far too short. This is the strangest and, as we gratefully come to understand, the norrellest magic a book lover could wish for.

Michael Alec Rose is an associate professor at Vanderbilt's Blair School of Music.

What kind of magic can make a nearly 800-page novel seem too short? Whatever it is, debut author Susanna Clarke is possessed by it, and her astonished readers will surely hope she never recovers. Her epic history of an alternative, magical England is so beautifully…

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