Subject: So you like Austen with dragons?
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Posted on: 2015-06-20 00:53:00 UTC

How about a little thought experiment. What kind of book would you get if you managed, through some peculiar contrivance, to have Dickens, Austen, and Defoe seated around a writing desk and had them knock together an urban fantasy novel based on their own contemporary lives?

Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell is that book exactly. It combines the wonderful Austenian comedies of manners with an almost Pratchettian gift for the superbly weird throwaway joke. For example, in a short passage concerning the ability of magicians to talk to trees, mention is made of Wulfric the Tartar, who enjoyed playing chess against mushrooms and lived a long and happy married life with a signpost, and whose son managed to acquire the good favour and hand of his beloved by removing her husband's entrails with a sponge, a process that is not detailed at all but reputedly took the gentleman seventeen years. And that's the thing about this book. Magic is actually bloody magical.

There's a fairly common trope in fantasy called The Magic Goes Away (Link to a TV Tropes page; you have been warned) in which, well, the magic goes away. At the end of the story, the magic drains off somewhere else, and the wonder leaves the world. JS&MN poses the question: what happens when the magic comes back?

The answer is that England once more has magic, and magic is strange and sometimes terrifying and sometimes uncontrollable and always, always a thing of unparalleled wonder.

I love how... magical the book feels. I can't not love it. And given your own recommendation, I think you will too. =]

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