Inevitably, after the book’s success, Clarke’s fans (and presumably her publishers) were soon clamoring for a sequel-and at first she seemed happy to oblige. It’s just that he did so with the help of Jonathan Strange’s handy ability to move rivers and temporarily shift Brussels to the middle of America. ![]() The Duke of Wellington, for example, still defeated Napoleon. But the magic was also ingeniously interwoven with history of a more recognizable kind. Among other things, this included a race of malevolent fairies who had the regrettable habit of kidnapping mortals into Other Lands. Certainly, it’s hard to think of another thousand-page, densely plotted, heavily footnoted debut novel about magicians in Regency England that went on to sell more than four million copies, to become a Time Book of the Year, and to inspire a TV miniseries, any number of obsessive fansites, and a board game.Įven Neil Gaiman, an early champion of Clarke’s, whose one regret about the novel is that it wasn’t twice as long, thought it “would be too unusual…for the general public.” Not only did Clarke appear to take the existence of magic for granted, but she gave its specifically English form a backstory spanning seven hundred years-which is where all those footnotes came in. The phrase “surprise best seller”-often applied to more or less any book that achieves some commercial success despite not being by John Grisham, Nicholas Sparks, or James Patterson-can rarely have been used more accurately than it was about Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. ![]() Susanna Clarke, Derbyshire, England, 2016
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