Jennifer Howard: The Uses of Fantasy
I’ve been seeing the paperback version of Susannah Clarke’s very long, very hefty Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell everywhere. It shares the unwieldy girth of all very long novels in small paperback incarnations: almost half as thick as it is wide, it can’t possibly lie flat or read easily once you get to the middle chapters. But as shameless escapism, the more of it the better (Cryptonomicon is another example).
Last year, when I read JS&MN, I was both amused and annoyed by it. It’s a pastiche of literary styles and mannered comedy that should be instantly recognizeable to a reader of Dickens and Austen. It’s clever. It’s well written. But as a “fantasy novel,” it didn’t quite feel right: not grand enough. Not serious enough.
Then I read this perceptive review by Jennifer Howard, from the Boston Review. She pretty much summarizes my own feelings about the book, putting it in the context of other recent fantasy offerings like Harry Potter and His Dark Materials. She says it lacks “the epic sense of Good and Evil, of things larger than ourselves, that makes the best fantasy so powerful and so necessary.”
Still, I wonder if it’s fair to reprimand a book like Clarke’s for failing to induce catharsis. I’d like to think Clarke is poking fun at the grand seriousness of the modern fantasy genre, its unending supply of earnest Everyman heroes and epic quests, by deliberately failing to meet our genre-driven expectations. Perhaps fantasy should take itself less seriously, at least some of the time. Humor is another way of reminding us that there are things larger than ourselves.