I'm not sure why she made this decision, I often explain to my friends in basic terms how cars and money work in our culture, so it's clear that endless expositionary dialogue is the most realistic way to inform the reader. I guess they just didn't have a strong enough sense of honor to instantly kill anyone who opposed them.Īnd then, instead of having her characters laboriously explain how the world worked to each other, she made brief mentions in footnotes, as if she were writing a history. For some reason, they also seemed hesitant to fall back on the default plan of attacking anything that gets in their way, which was probably why this book was so long. Instead of acting as recognizable archetypes, they were complex, conflicted, and developed as the story progressed. It didn't have a simplistic, internal system to allow it to act as a one-for-one substitute with technology, it was just all unpredictable and otherworldly and unknowable-how can you even call that 'magic'?Īnd the characters were overly-complicated. Her magic didn't conveniently solve all of the characters' problems, instead, they wasted time thinking through conflicts and then had to solve them by taking action how dull is that? The magic was weird, anyways. When will authors like Clarke realize that what the fantasy genre needs are more pseudo-medieval monomyths that sprawl out into fifteen volumes? Sigh, just what we need, another revolutionary, unusual fantasy book by an author with a practiced mastery of tone.

She lives in Cambridge with her partner, the novelist and reviewer Colin Greenland. Another, 'Mr Simonelli or The Fairy Widower,' was shortlisted for a World Fantasy Award in 2001. One, 'The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse,' first appeared in a limited-edition, illustrated chapbook from Green Man Press. She has published seven short stories and novellas in US anthologies.

There she began working on her first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.įrom 1993 to 2003, Susanna Clarke was an editor at Simon and Schuster's Cambridge office, where she worked on their cookery list. She returned to England in 1992 and spent the rest of that year in County Durham, in a house that looked out over the North Sea. The following year she taught English in Bilbao. In 1990, she left London and went to Turin to teach English to stressed-out executives of the Fiat motor company.

She was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford, and has worked in various areas of non-fiction publishing, including Gordon Fraser and Quarto. A nomadic childhood was spent in towns in Northern England and Scotland. Susanna Clarke was born in Nottingham in 1959.

Strange and norrell book