Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a clear phenomenon, a richly texture tome of literary fantasy that also happens to be a mass-market best seller adapted by the BBC. The plot is almost simple, at the dawn of the 19th century, English magic has been reduced to a handful of elderly eccentrics discussing dry and inaccurate histories. Mr Norrell, last of the practical magicians, seeks to restore English magic to its rightful place, first by winning the war against Napoleon, and then by putting all of magic on sound rational principles. He takes on a student, Jonathan Strange, but of course nothing is as easy as it seems.

Mr. Norrell makes a secret deal with a fairie lord, who enchants away Lady Pole, wife of an important minister that Mr Norrell restored to life to prove his powers as a wizard. Strange and Norrell fall to quarreling, and Norrell's high-handed habits of secrecy destroy all efforts to educate other wizards, and Strange goes mad and is enveloped in a pillar of perpetual night as he attempts to find his own wife, stolen by the same fairie lord. The plot, in my opinion, does not really matter. Clarke delights in little character sketches, and in devising an immense history of English magic, based around the ancient king Jon Uskglass and his magical Kingdom of Northern England.

Clarke has been compared to Dickens or Austen, but I think this is a mistake due to the shared settings of 19th century England. Clarke is really the heir to Tolkien, in her love of setting building, of magic as something truly strange and awesome and terrible, and of not giving a fig for conventional notions of plot or pacing or protagonists. This is a long book, Jonathan Strange doesn't show up for the first quarter. Mr. Norrell is the most dis-likable main character I've encountered in this Hugo's project, and that includes Gateway's Robinette Broadhead, who abandons his friends and lover to eternal damnation in a black hole to save his skin. I found myself reading chapters and putting the book aside with little desire to see the story through, at least up until the final confrontation between Strange and Norrell and the unnamed faerie king of Lost-Hope.

So about magic. Magic is sadly deprecated in modern fantasy. Perhaps its presented as another branch of science or martial arts that anyone can learn. Or maybe it's a matter of being of the right bloodline, and being born with talent. Or magic is simply willpower, or the willingness to bargain away something precious for temporal power. In Clarke's world, magic is a matter of attunement, of being able to speak to the trees and the stones and the sky, and skilled magicians really do become Something Else, concerned which what's beyond the sky and behind the rain. Though in many ways Strange & Norrell was a week long, 750 page slog (plus footnotes), those moments of true eerie glory redeem a lot of rather pointless parlor scenes.