Wishful thinking, perhaps…

-kd

Thanks again.

And to say that I loved everything about the book—pacing, tone, writing, structure, characters, interactions, humor—except…. that I can’t stand prophecy/destiny as plot engines. Drives me bonkers. Violates everything I believe about life and about good writing. Other than that, I had a marvelous time with the book and have convinced my wife to experience it as well (she’s working through the audio version, by necessity) and she’s having a blast.

I always wanted to hear Ms. Clark’s take on moving from the portion of the publishing world where she talked about writing to actually doing the writing, and how that influenced the plot, if at all.

[1] before arguing the mustitude of CT, take into account the fact that they are having a seminar on a fantasy novel rather than simply enjoying it. As someone who’s enjoying the seminar to no end, I’ll cop to a certain amount of mustiness myself.

Oh, so true. (And thanks to Susanna and the CTites for this seminar.) It’s a cliché to invoke Emily Brontë (especially considering what Haworth has become these days), but the shimmer between thisness and otherness (inside and out) that’s so much a part of living within the northern landscape has long been rich for writers.

Slaves are property. Period. Stephen is interesting in that he is a servant, but his having been born a slave in a world where slavery is absolutely intertwined with race makes him different. Interestingly, race, and therefore the implicit ties to slavery are not issues for Stephen’s fairy patron, as least as I read it. Stephen’s nobility is a creation of the fairy and a reflection of the fairy’s own self-worth. I don’t mean to say that Stephen is not intrinsically a noble character—only that it seems that, in terms of the fairy’s (arguably very modern) attitude toward Stephen’s servitude is framed and formed by his own opinion of what Stephen should be. He cannot conceive that he is not right in his opinion, just as he cannot see that Lady Pole is miserable.

I definitely feel Belle and Maria’s frustration at the short supply of compelling central female characters in fantasy fiction. Indeed, female characters are underrepresented and underdeveloped in many if not most genres. But the onus should not be place on women writers to make up the difference. That would be an unfair burden, a tax on the creative powers of women writer.

The more fundamental source of the problem is societal, cultural. Starting from childhood, girls often watch cartoons or read stories where it is necessary to identify with male characters, but the reverse is seldom true. Micky Mouse and bugs bunny are loved by girls and boys. But boys are sure to be taunted and teased for admitting a liking to, say, My little pony. As a result, is it not surprising that women writers like Susanna have no problem crafting exquisitly nuanced characters like the adorably curmudgeonly Mr. Norrel, while even quite accomplished male writers often end up crafting their obligatory female love interests out of stock cardboard.

It was masterfully narrated by Simon Prebble. Thus the narrator of the book in my imagination is male.

The most important thing Prebble brought to the story was gravitas. The fantastical subject is treated with utter seriousness. (Rob Inglis’ expert narration of LOTR is alike in this.) When I later picked it up in book form and started to read it, I was immediately struck by a different tone—fusty, mannered, almost precious. I doubt that in this form it would have succeeded in sucking me in so completely, or holding me right to the end.

The narration is authoritative and impersonal, which lends it an omniscience not conducive to imagining the story as being related by one of the inhabitants of the story-world.

Of course, a woman narrator could have related the story in an equally authoritative and impersonal manner. But I think a woman’s voice would likely have come across as more personal and more knowing, and thus more likely to slyly insert herself in the story-world.

In the audio version, each footnote is a separate track on the CD, inserted at the moment the citation appears in the text, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. The result is that the listener encounters them as paranthetically integrated into the body of the text. What the book-reader may simply glance at—as when the footnote is merely a citation of yet another fictitious work—the audio-reader hears in its entirety, which necessarily breaks up the story. Of course, one has the option of fast-forwarding past them, but I never did. Like most readers, I found the long digressions delightful.

The narration can affect not only the overall tone, but the characters too. In Prebble’s characterization, Norrell is whiny, and therefore much less likeable than Strange, who is haughty but darkly serious. Arabella comes across as a helpmeet. The gentleman with the thistledown hair is suitably menacing and self-involved. Most sympathetic of all is Childermas, whose rough Northern accent immediately signals his integrity (as any fan of Shakespeare on the stage will know).

All in all, a wonderful book. My thanks to Clarke and Prebble for many hours of enjoyment.

Thinking about it a bit more, I think her historical verisimilitude is loyal not so much to the subjectivities of people as they truly were during the Regency period, as it is loyal to the narrative voice and point of view of the great 19th century novels. I think she did have a choice between writing a novel that was true to the subjective lives as lived by people in that era (plus magic) and writing a novel that was true to the voice and limitations of the early 19th century novel, and she chose the latter. The servants are relatively happy not because servants were happy then, but because that is how her model novels portrayed it. So apart from the slavery analogy, I was wondering why she chose to write not a modern novel about Regency England (plus magic), but an 1820s/30s (as she says) novel about the recent past.

(I should point out that I’m talking here specifically about white women and servants. It’s not possible to take any view of slavery other than the one we have today. The position of people of African descent during the early nineteenth century was at best impossible, at worst a living nightmare.)

I would like Susanna Clarke to say a bit more about this if she will. Her arguments about the subjective happiness and complacency of the servant classes (especially the upper servants) seem equally applicable to discussions of slaves.

Being a servant in the Regency period was not necessarily degrading…Some servants (of course not all) would have been proud of what they did….It seems to me that if we see women, servants, the lower classes largely in terms of how liberated or oppressed they were, we miss catching a glimpse of them as they actually were.

What someone “actually” is here strictly depends on their mindset, but surely there were happy slaves, proud of being in the house and of their status among the others, wary of incipient rapes like English maids, but otherwise content. But of course “them as they actually were” is a more general statement, not about some servants being content, but about the group on the whole. Were English servants and women, on the whole, okay with their status in a way slaves weren’t? Or should one go beyond a strict adherence to mental attitudes in order to conclude that someone can be both proud and content on the one hand, and simultaneously oppressed and degraded on the other? I suspect Clarke would say that the latter position is anti-novelistic, not true to the lives as lived. But there are plenty of novels—particularly ones with quasi-omniscient narrators—that can show how badly off women, slaves, and servants can be even when they are not aware of it. Clarke just didn’t chose to write such a novel. But to choose to ignore the vast numbers of suffering servants and women and focus on the “some” that might be proud is a delicate moral position, even for a novelist, and one that seems equally practicable in a slave narrative.