Of course, the fact that I can muse in this way about minor characters does indicate that the book really is quite good.

adm, I probably should have emphasized this more, but one thing that interests me is just how much like a fairy story “Two Cities” is in terms of its mood and atmosphere. In a way, the comparison with JSMR may shed more light on Dickens than Clarke in that regard. I may be that I got it wrong way round by trying to run it the other way, i.e. emphasizing that Clarke’s faeries are like Jacobins, rather than emphasizing that Dickens’ Jacobins are like faeries. I dunno. I think Norrell as Burke is good. I was actually thinking of making a joke about that, continuing my series. Burke’s famous volume, “Reflections on the Revolution in Faerie”.

As to the Granny Weatherwax/Pross analogy, I was thinking about the dialogue between Granny and the Queen in their final confrontation … well, I’ll just quote it. (I actually wrote a very baggy/sloppy early version of this post at J&B in which I included it.)

“Go back,” said Granny. “You call yourself some kind of goddess and you know nothing, madam, nothing. What don’t die can’t live. What don’t live can’t change. What don’t change can’t learn. The smallest creature that dies in the grass knows more than you. You’re right. I’m older. You’ve lived longer than me but I’m older than you. And better’n you. And, madam, that ain’t hard.”

The Queen struck wildly.

The rebounded force of the mental blow knocked Nanny Ogg to her knees. Granny Weatherwax blinked.

“A good one,” she croaked. “But still I stand, and still I’ll not kneel. And still I have strength – ”
An elf keeled over. This time the Queen swayed.

“Oh, and I have no time for this,” she said, and snapped her fingers.

There was a pause. The Queen glanced around at her elves.

“They can’t fire,” said Granny. “And you wouldn’t want that, would you? So simple an end?”

“You can’t be holding them! You have not that much power!”

“Do you want to find out how much power I have, madam? Here, on the grass of Lancre?”

So you have again, the old and weak-seeming figure, desperate and on the defense on behalf of others against the DeFarge like villain. The defender is invested with surprising solidity through an invocation/connection with the land. Pross the four-poster English oak; Stephen while the spell is cast. What gets subtracted from Granny (like Stephen) is the comic servility of Pross.

In all three cases, it’s a nice, sentimental-dramatic device. Makes for a great climax. As with Pross, the Pratchett dialogue is totally over the top. He’s really getting maudlin, too, but I’m sort of a sucker for that in these cases. And the writing. (“An elf keeled over.” If you find yourself writing that sentence, you’ve got to think whether you are getting a bit worked up. But I really love “Lords and Ladies”.) I think it is notable that Clarke, too, really cuts loose in the scene in which the spell is effecting Stephen. There’s nothing Jane Austen-like about that scene, or the writing at that point. But one thing that’s nice about that scene is precisely that it does contrast with the comparative restraint of the drawing room stylistics at the start.

OTOH, I suppose that you could continue your analogy, not in the sense of Dickens, but perhaps more in terms of Norrell’s own rather Burkean reaction to the fairies and more particularly to the magical revolution that John Quiggan implies.

The most useful description of magic realism I’ve come across was Jo Walton’s: “In magic realism it’s the universe producing magically what ought to happen. . . . In magic realism, the numinous is there to illuminate the other things. In fantasy, the other things are here to illuminate the numinous.”

I would say (and have) that JS&NM is all about illuminating the numinous—-and, indeed, about the ways the numinous can’t be illuminated—-so I would not call it magic realism. (This is another point of disagreement I have with John Clute’s review.)