This is part two of an I-don’t-know-how-many-total-entries-there-will-be blogg concerning Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a novel by Susanna Clarke. At 439 pages, I now find myself 44% through the book. One may think that this would make discussing the book worlds easier, but in reality it is almost as difficult as before. This is because I already discussed everything that happened in the first two hundred pages, so I can’t really go back too many times.

If you are looking for a cohesive plot summary, I suggest you look elsewhere. The purpose of this blogg is to develop commentary, not concrete details. I will, however, give a brief overview. If you are looking for a plotline, then I suggest you visit this site:

<http://www.imtoolazytoreadtheentirebook.com/>. Or maybe check out this one: <http://www.sparknotesismygod.com/>. My personal favorite is <http://www.couldyousurviveifwikipediaceasedtoexist.com/>.

Anyway, the next section of the book introduces Jonathan Strange. Unfortunately, it also comes back to Segundus and Honeyfoot, two characters who I find a bit dull. They just don’t have the sparkle and charm that characters like Mr. Norrell and other people do. Segundus and Honeyfoot discover Strange in the garden of an ivy-covered house in Wiltshire. He is in the middle of trying to delve into someone else’s dreams when Segundus accidentally interrupts the dream by entering it and scaring away the person Strange is about to talk to. In this way, Honeyfoot and Segundus become acquainted with Mr Strange, who already knows about Mr. Norrell. This is because whenever Strange goes to bookstores asking about magical texts, the clerks always say that a man has already bought them all. This man is Mr. Norrell, the owner of two very, very large libraries. Eventually Mr. Norrell takes Strange in as his apprentice, and is delighted to have someone to talk to about magic. Both Norrell and Strange help out many times in the war against the French. With the magicians’ help, Napoleon abdicates and England wins the battle.

My favorite parts of the book are definitely the ones that describe the magic performed by Strange and Norrell. For instance, at one point Mr. Strange is called because a ship has been turned on its side by the tides. He first suggests using wind to just turn the boat right again, but the townspeople begin to panic and yell, telling him that this would surely snap the boat in two. Then Strange gets the idea of conjuring many horse-like creatures to help push the boat up. They glisten and sparkle in the sunlight because they are made of the sand from the sandbanks. Strange forgets to make the horses obedient, and the sailors end up capturing only twenty of the hundred. The creatures are successful in righting the boat, but then there is the issue of what to do with them. Strange has no notion of how to get rid of the sand-horses, and they swim across the seas for a day-and-a-half before settling down again on the banks. Unfortunately, this ends up changing around any previously measured depths for this area of the sea, because the creatures don’t lie down where they sprang up from. I enjoy the scenes that show the magic because Susana describes it in ways that I’ve never read before. Often, magic is done with wands or orbs or other such objects. In Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, all magicians need only to know the spells to recite, and the materials around them. For instance, to be able to see things happening in other parts of the world, one would need to find a basin of water to make the visions appear in.

The two characters that I really don’t like are Vinculus and Childermass. The first is a filthy street magician who hates people like Mr. Norrell who can actually do magic. Vinculus is in reality a fluke. He can’t actually do any real magic, and this paired with his raggedy hair and drunken attitude is what makes me dislike him so much. I also loathe Childermass, Mr. Norrell’s servant. He always has a sort of mysterious air about him, but it’s more of a sly, I’m-up-to-no-good kind of air than a cunning, clever one. He has the ability to not only act as a normal servant should and carry out the usual tasks, but can also stand in with noblemen and demand respect. Childermass is often out on mysterious trips, many of which are not ever talked about. This and the fact that he is also not very kind prevent him from being on my likeable characters list.

In my previous blogg about this book, I found that some of the footnotes were very long, the most lengthy being two pages. An updated measurement shows the longest footnote is a staggering four pages long. Remember that the writing on these is very small, so Clarke and really pack it in. I still, however, find the footnotes to be just as entertaining.

By far the best instance of humor for this section was the excerpt about Napoleon’s magician. Napoleon was jealous of England’s magicians, and the only one he could find was a Dutchman named Witloof who had a magic wardrobe.

“Every time Witloof entered the wardrobe there was the most hideous noise as if half the demons in Hell were screaming inside it, clouds of little stars issued from the cracks and hinges and the wardrobe rocked slightly on its ball-and-claw-feet. After the three questions had been answered, Buonaparte (that’s the way it’s spelled, Mr. Bailey) regarded the wardrobe silently for some moments, and then he strode over and pulled open the doors. Inside he found a goose (to make the noises) and some saltpetre (to produce the silver stars) and a dwarf (to ignite the saltpetre and prod the goose).”

The idea behind the wardrobe is pure genius. The fact that Witloof thought he could get away with such a ridiculous trick is funny, and that paired with how the wardrobe works makes it hilarious.