I haven’t read Clarke’s comments yet. On the other hand, authors are not completely reliable about what is in their text. Asimov’s anecdote about “Nightfall” comes to mind. Convergence and resonance, though, do seem better ways of putting things that equivalence. With that in mind, this gloss is an illuminating way of looking at the novel.

I’m still noodling around with the notion of the secret story of the book, and whether it has to remain off-stage. If we were to read the story of Dildrum and Doldrum, would it be just another intrigue? Is it only interesting because it is hinted at, because it speaks of worlds running in parallel to ours? This is a problem of mystery more generally; how can it be as good as the hints conjured in the reader’s imagination?

If magic has as basic a role in the foundations of Clarke’s England as is hinted, revealing its workings could be troublesome. One parallel that springs to mind is the wild magic in Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant books. As long as it is wild, it has all the power of possibility. One it is revealed to do this and not that, it loses some of its potency. Or at least it did for me.

Another thing, is the implied question of other magics, as opposed to English magic. Is there an equally powerful Polish magic? Lettish? Latgale? Livonian? Slovene? Bavarian? French? Provencal? Catalan?

yes, it surely is a loss. But then any reading of the sort that I’m doing here is a loss if it’s taken literally. What I was setting out to do was less to say that Clarke had written a sociological tract, than that some of the resonance of the book came from the convergence of her themes with a certain view of English society in that period. Fully recognizing – and perhaps I should have stated that more clearly – that there were lots of other things going on and that the novel is a novel, not a tract. And I think that Clarke’s polite rebuttal to my argument really makes it clear that there are other things going on.

If I’d had time and space, I’d have liked to have written a lot more about the relationship between JSAMN and Hope Mirlees’ Lud-In-The-Mist which is a really lovely novel with equally capricious fairies. And one of my favourite sentences in the English language – when a character is reprimanded for wearing canary yellow clothes when he should be in mourning, he defends himself by saying that it was a “blackish shade of canary.”

On the Raven King = gentleman with thistledown hair argument, it seems pretty clear to me that Kate is right. I did wonder when reading the book though, whether the gentleman might not have been King Oberon, who, we are told, had fostered Uskglass at an early age. Which would be a very interesting twist. But it may be a reading too far ..

I would say that it’s explicitly contradicted. We met the Raven King (a.k.a. John Uskglass) briefly at the end, and he’s most definitely not the gentleman with the thistledown hair.

Second, can the secret story be told? There’s certainly hints that JS&MN is just the first, that the mysteries will be unravelled in later books. But what if it can’t be? What if it all dissolves into air? I think that’s what happened, for example, in the second and third books of His Dark Materials. The possibilities that were raised could not possibly be met, and we are left with a slightly wheezing take on Paradise Lost. (Not that writing a book so thoroughly anti-religion is a small achievement in this age of cheap pieties, but it wasn’t what The Golden Compass hinted at.) Is it actually possible to tell the secret tale behind JS&MN?