The English Magicians & the Raven King
The English Magicians & the Raven King
Twenty years ago, Susanna Clarke's "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" came to us "out of mists and rain." Reading it as a teenager changed my life forever.
Around the turn of the twelfth century A.D., a group of men abandoned a baby in a remote forest. The men had already carried out their nefarious plot—murdering a nobleman by the name of John d’Uskglass, whose estate once rested in the north of England. Lest they one day be outmaneuvered by Uskglass’s heir, they left the baby in an ancient wood, hoping the wild beasts would finish the job.
But the fairies found him first.
And the sidhe did what they do best: they took the child and brought him to their lands.
Years later, in 1110 A.D., a strange army materialized on the outskirts of Newcastle. The riders spoke no English, nor French, but wherever they went, cities and towns fell in quick succession and the cry of birdsong heralded their glory. It was a fairy army, come to conquer the north of England. Their leader was a human boy.
He went by many names—the Raven King, the King in the North—but his preferred name was that of his father, John Uskglass.
The events of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell take place centuries later, during the Napoleonic Wars. The story follows two magicians (sometimes friends, sometimes foes) who endeavor to restore English magic and lead the country to victory against the French. But the story I just told you of John Uskglass is the novel’s founding myth. Though he abandoned his northern kingdom in 1434 and disappeared into Faerie once again, the Raven King lingers in the mists and shadows of the narrative—even while Mr. Norrell works tirelessly to make English magic “respectable” by ridding it of its medieval mysticism. As Norrell is forced to confront, you can’t have magic without the mystical, and the sharp talons of the Otherlands are poised to claw their way back in.
This year is the twentieth anniversary of the novel’s publication, and I was thrilled to learn that in October, Susanna Clarke is releasing a novella set in the same world, entitled The Wood at Midwinter. I was still in elementary school when Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was published, and at 800 pages, with a Dickensian-inspired writing style, it might have been just a bit too much for a seven-year-old.
Luckily, I encountered the novel in high school. At fifteen, I re-discovered my love of fantasy, and after devouring Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus and Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, I was ravenous for more. Some perusing on Goodreads led me to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.
The book is a brilliant alternative history, set in an England where magic is widely understood to have been real, but lost to the annals of history. At the start of the novel, we meet the York Society of Magicians, one of many private clubs whose members study magic, but don’t practice it themselves. Mr. Norrell’s revelation that he is in fact a practical magician shakes the British public and launches the plot of the novel.
Looking back, I’m struck by the brilliance of setting this story during the Regency period. The preceding century marked the Age of Enlightenment, a time when the mysticism and religious turmoil of earlier eras were cast away. Reason and rationality were to be prized above all else, and the movement planted the seeds for the liberties we enjoy today.
And yet…
Something deep in the heart of human nature can’t be explained by reason alone. The Romantics knew this, and in Susanna Clarke’s tale, Jonathan Strange knows it, too. His rivalry with Mr. Norrell rests on a philosophical difference that echoes the artistic and literary debates of their age. Norrell is married to his books and resists any practical magic that wanders into mystical or numinous territory. (Though he can be very hypocritical at times—I won’t spoil this, for those who haven’t read the book.)
Strange, on the other hand, delights in improvisation and longs for the wild magic of medieval England, when magicians spoke to trees and traveled the roads of Faerie. Despite his natural talent, Strange’s recklessness can have serious consequences.
And what of the Raven King? As a fantasy writer, I learned a very important lesson from this book: if you wish to endow a character with a numinous aura, you cannot give the reader too much of them. When I first read the book as a teenager, I found myself often longing to meet the Raven King, the mysterious figure who stands at the center of the novel’s legends and a good deal of its conflicts. But Clarke is wise not to offer too much of him—doing so would have made John Uskglass too immediate, too human.
Clarke’s novel also harkens back to the old fairy stories, when the “Good People” earned their title as a matter of appeasement, and fairies posed a serious danger to one’s children, one’s crops, and one’s life. Even still, the novel forces readers to examine the cruelties of our own world by drawing parallels between human and fairy society.
There’s the case of Stephen Black, an African-British man born on a slave ship to a mother who died in childbirth before she could name him. While Stephen is free, he leads a challenging life in Regency England, employed as a butler by the son of his mother’s enslaver. The lead fairy of the story, known simply as the Gentleman with the Thistle-Down Hair, sees greatness in Stephen… even as he compels Stephen to act as his valet. The novel poses the question: given the scale of atrocity of which humans are capable, are fairies that much worse when they steal children from their homes?
A similar theme echoes in the story of Lady Pole. Lady Pole is the wife of Sir Walter Pole, the employer of Stephen Black. While I don’t want to give too much of the plot away, her own brushes with Faerie echo the constraints of her life—a woman in the 19th century, objectified and prized for her dowry, conveniently put away when she is no longer useful.
It may sound dramatic, but reading this novel as a teenager changed my life. It catalyzed my interest in folklore, especially fairy folklore, and broadened my vision of the fantasy genre—that in adulthood, I could still experience magic and genuine awe in the pages of a book.
The land is all too shallow
It is painted on the sky
And trembles like the wind-shook rain
When the Raven King goes by
For always and for always
I pray remember me
Upon the moors, beneath the stars
With the King’s wild company.-Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
By the end, the reader is left wondering, which version of a magical England is best? The safety and politeness of Norrell’s “respectable” magic, or the windswept romance of John Uskglass, with all his majesty and danger? It takes true sorcery to make the tumultuous, blood-soaked Middle Ages seem more appealing. But like the writers of chivalric romance, and the Romantic poets who followed them, Susanna Clarke certainly possesses the gift.
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