Book Review: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

 By Susanna Clarke

• Pub Date: 2004

• Genre: Magical Fiction, Fantasy, Historical Fiction

• Where I bought this book: Roebling Books & Coffee, Newport, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: I was enchanted with her other work, Piranesi  

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   An imaginative, expressive and tantalizing labyrinth of a novel, harmed only by its somewhat excessive length.

    Still, I was enthralled by its writing, its originality, its sense of magic, and the vibes it gives off of being an old, even ancient, work of art.

    Set mostly in early 19th Century England, a time of lords and ladies and excessive privilege amidst the belief of Rule Britannia, it showcases a time when Great Britain ruled the world with its dominance and might -- and was determined to return literal magical powers to the island.

    To do so, the country recruits the two magicians of the title, who have determinedly different ideas about the proper use of magic. Mr Norrell, a bookish and crotchety old man, sees magic as a calling that should be limited to those who venerate it. Indeed, in his reverence for the use and history of magic, he sees himself as its gatekeeper.

    But under pressure from the country's nobility, he agrees to take on a young student, Jonathan Strange, a gentle soul who has some liberal -- and to Mr Norrell, decidedly appalling -- ideas for magic's use and place in society.

    Clarke's narrator is a regal lady, of high repute, who will not be trifled with. She knows all, and will deign to tell you in her own sweet time. She will not be rushed, nor forced to use some of those new fangled words of English. She will shew you what is going on, when and how she chuses to. She writes of mediaeval times, Her words are rare, exquisite and precise.

    She writes of a doctor and his family on a summer tour of Venice, Italy.

They were excessively pleased with the Campo Santa Maria Formosa. They thought the façades of the houses very magnificent -- they could not praise them highly enough. But the sad decay, which building, bridges and church all displayed, seem to charm them even more. They were Englishmen, and, to them, the decline of other nations was the most natural thing in the world. They belonged to a race blessed with so sensitive an appreciation of it own talents (and so doubtful an opinion of any body else's) that they would not have been at all surprised to learn that the Venetians themselves had been entirely ignorant of the merits of their own city -- until the Englishmen had come to tell them it was delightful.

    Oh, and the feuds between the two men are devilish and dramatic. Mini spoiler alert warning:. At one point, one of the duo publishes a three-volume history of magic. The other uses his powers to buy up all the copies and make them disappear.

    The tale itself winds through the Napoleonic Wars, the Battle of Waterloo, and the tale of an ancient king from the North of England returning to claim his domain. Oh, and there are Faeries. Lots of Faeries. Good Faeries, bad Faeries, sneaky Faeries, and many, many more.

    At times, it's a bit overwhelming. The story gets muddled and a tad repetitive. You find yourself wishing she'd wrap it up, as the night continues on into morning, but she will not be rushed. Any resolution seems far off.

    But as with Clarke's novel Piranesi, it is how the story is told that is the true work of art.

Book Review: Learned By Heart

 By Emma Donoghue

• Pub Date: 2023

• Where I bought this book: Roebling Point Books, Covington, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: Donoghue is one of my go-to writers

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   Writing a work of historical fiction that closely hews to the truth about the time period and the people involved takes a lot of work and research, as well as imagination and writing skills. Donoghue nails it.

    Using letters from the protagonist, Eliza Raine, along with other explorations of her life, Donoghue puts together a story of young love, frustration, and gender non-conformity in a girls school in early 19th Century England. It's a story of melancholy, misunderstanding, and mischief.

    Eliza is the child of an English father and a mother from India. Her friend Lister is from Yorkshire, and is what was once called a tomboy -- daring, wild, and reluctant to conform to society's expectations and gender stereotypes. Both are orphans who live with male caretakers, and are shipped off to live in the Manor School for young ladies in York.

    There's a sadness in this novel, born of two girls trying to navigate a world that refuses to accept them, and in which they cannot live happily. The structures set for them ignore their wants, needs, and desires. For Eliza, there is the added nuance of race -- her Indian heritage is clear in the color of her skin, and it influences every facet of her young life. 

    She is seen as neither English nor Indian; every time she tries to assert her Englishness, she is rejected as a half-breed, a child of colonialists, a girl that belongs neither here nor there. Lister finds her own rejections sort of thrilling; she can fall back on her supposed high class and the wealth of her family's holding in York.

    We rarely know what is really happening. Some of the characters may be unreliable, or are holding back their reality. Situations change, and as the girls find love in each other, the world around them can be mystifying. 

    One metaphor comes from Mr. Tate, one of of the few male figures at the school, a  teacher and husband of one of the mothers of the dormitory. Despite his talents as a musician and instructor, he finds only sadness in his work, despite the joy he brings to others.

    Donoghue depends heavily on the time and place, the changing mores and structures of the Georgian period in Great Britain. Much in the tale is left to the reader's imagination, but it remains a thrilling and evocative read.

Book Review: Factory Girls

 By Michelle Gallen

• Pub Date: 2022

• Where I bought this book: The Strand, New York 

• Why I bought this book: I am always on the lookout for contemporary Irish fiction, especially focusing on Northern Ireland

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    Northern Ireland circa 1994, to lift a phrase from an English author of note, was the best of times and the worst of times.

    Serious discussions were taking place about possible talks that could lead to a ceasefire by the warring paramilitaries, the leaving of the British Army patrols, and true efforts at self government. But The Troubles went on, with the corruption, bombings, separations, discrimination, and revenge killings a daily fact of life for the two communities. In some ways, it intensified. As one character says,

 "a ceasefire has tae be in the works the way your lot are settling old scores before they have tae lay their guns down."

    Into this steps Maeve Murray, a brash, intelligent, yet insecure Catholic woman, waiting for the results of her GCSE tests, which will determine whether she goes to college in London for her desired journalism degree or gets stuck in the miserably small border town where she lives. For the summer though, she takes a job in a factory pressing shirts. It's a deliberately integrated working place -- meaning Catholics and Protestants work side-by-side -- with a government grant from Invest Northern Ireland and an English manager named Andy Sturbridge, who likes to get friendly with the girls working in his shop.

    Gallen uses to setting to explain The Troubles through Maeve and her friends, Caroline and Aoife, also with summer jobs in the factory while awaiting their test results. Maeve explains to an Englishman who claims Irish heritage about the dilemma of her living in a land that's both Irish and British, but not being accepted by the Republic of Ireland or Great  Britain.

What you don't get is I'm not even Irish -- not proper Irish. I just want tae be. But all I am to the Free Staters is a dirty Northerner. I'm as pathetic as the Prods trying to be British when your lot think they're just a pack of Paddies. You don't want them. Them down south don't want us. Everyone just wants us to crawl away and die some place dark where they don't have to listen to us squealing for attention.

    The language is stark and real. Maeve's voice is real. Caroline is the quintessential teenager trying to find herself. Fidelma, a long-suffering factory hand who takes shit from no one, provides the exasperated feminist voice. Aoife is the daughter of wealth and privilege  from Dublin, stuck in a world she doesn't understand.

    Others show the Protestant perspective, or the outsider looking to take advantage, and those who are hoping to change things.

    It's Northern Ireland as it was before peace. It cries out for a sequel.

Book Review: Queenie

Queenie, by Candice Carty-Williams

Much like its protagonist, this novel is bi-polar. Some of it -- especially the final couple of chapters -- is extraordinary. 

But too much of it is mundane or head-scratching. It's meant to portray a woman going through a tough period in her life, but sometimes you want to be like her grandmother and figuratively smack her upside the head and tell her to get her act together.

OK, perhaps that is cruel thought when discussing a book about a potential mental illness, an issue the book handles quite well. But you often see where Queenie is headed, and want to beg her to avoid the poor choices you know she is going to make. It's going to turn out badly -- you know it, she knows it; hell, all of England knows it -- yet she's going to play it through.

And yes, I recognize I am a man critiquing a woman's perspective, with all the limitations that entails. 

Queenie Jenkins is a young black woman of Jamacian heritage growing up in south London. A lot is changing in her life -- she's starting a new job, her white boyfriend is on the edge of dumping her -- taking a break, he calls it -- and her traditional Caribbean neighborhood of Brixton is undergoing gentrification. So she tries to muddle through by overreacting, underreacting, and looking to fill her loneliness with sex.

Queenie also tries to be a politcal activist. She expresses both sadness and anger at the number of black men and women in the United States and the United Kingdom who are being harassed and attacked by police. She tries, without success, to get her editor to give her assigments on the issue. She is an avid supporter of Black Lives Matter.

The book includes some decent arguments on these issue. But not near enough, and when they occur, they seem like afterthoughts.  They are few and far between, being overtaken by her chatter with her girlfriends, her poor decisions about men, her roommates, and her family problems. 

Perhaps I wanted and expected a more political book about dealing with what it's like to grow up as a black woman in London. Because I did get some of that. But I got more pesonal matters -- if you enjoy reading about those, go ahead and grab this book. It does have its strong points.

Overall, it just isn't -- to overuse a British phrase -- my cup of tea.

Book Review: Mad and Furious City

In Our Mad and Furious City, by Guy Gunaratne

Gunaratne's debut novel is both sad and angry, full of hope and full of despair. It is beautifully written in the voices of the old and the young, those who revolt in violence and those who see courage in running from the gathering storm. It displays the voices of those united in their poverty, who have lived its hatreds, its futility, and its destructive impulses.

This is London at its inner core, with the story of the dispossessed, growing up in the shadow of massive towers built for the unwanted. It's the story directly told by those involved -- the children and the parents who know the violence and the heartbreak of being outside the mainstream.

The story is told in five voices: There are Selvon and Ardan, who are both looking for a way out. Yusuf is torn between the comfort of and the growing oppression of his religion, and the influence it is having on his older brother, Irfan. Nelson and Caroline are the remnants of an older generations who have seen it all before.

At the start, the style is a bit confusing: the characters take some time to become individually known and recognized. Their occasional use of British slang muddles the issue; here Google was my friend, as I looked up the words and learned something. Those terms quickly became well-known, innit?

The voices soon become familiar and reassuring, and their temperament becomes soothing as the story increasingly grows edgy. Here comes the aftermath of a soldier being killed and his body hanged. An angry white mob wants revenge, and descends upon the council estate (public housing) of mostly immigrants of color from Southwest Asia. Those residents, who simply want to move on with their lives, either stay and battle or avoid the fight. Complicating the issue is the new leadership of the local mosque, which wants its membership to become more insular and conservative.

The writing complements the book's rhythm and flow. As the struggle nears its climax, the chapters get shorter, the writing tighter, and the action more intense. You feel yourself in the midst of everything, as you are hearing from all the characters' perspectives. It's a strong ending for the story, by a brilliant writer.

The book's blurbs are filled with comments about how we will hear a lot from this young writer. I agree. This novel was on the longlist for the 2018 Man Booker prize. He is off to a fine start.