After Joanne Rowling enamoured the world with her adventures about Harry Potter, the wizard and his wizarding world, everyone was waiting for someone who could write about the subject in 'a more literary way'.
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So, when Susanna Clarke was able to publish her version of the British world of wizards, she was hailed as a heroine herself because (as the Guardian claimed) she 'perfectly conveys all that can be brilliant about British literature and manages to be refreshingly different from either. Her novel feels unduly classical and nostalgic and yet timeless at the very same time and it has, at the heart of it, that thing which every truly great novel needs: a brilliant story'.
'Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell' imagines an 18th-Century England in which magic still exists, but as something people did once, long ago. All 'magicians' do is merely being 'theoretical magicians' because 'real magic' is considered vulgar. Mr Norrell wants to bring 'real magic' back to be respectable in English society.
While reading the rather expensive three-book luxury boxed set, I quickly started to get bored. There seemed to be no big encompassing story that culminated into a brilliant climax but the books seemed to just be a collection of short stories. There was never any feeling that the personality of Mr Norris grew or adapted itself to the changing circumstances.
Yes, for some reviewers the writing must have seemed literary, but only in the sense that it showed 'book learning' or 'bookcraft'. In reality, Susanna Clarke felt like a bit of a show-off.
In the end, I desperately longed for J.K. Rowling who is always able to put so much fun into each sentence she writes and manages to have a clear understanding of what people want to read.
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