When I was getting ready to start work on this site again it occurred to me that I'd never actually told anyone why Strange & Norrell is my favorite modern novel. It's not much of a secret, really, but I was very busy with other (stupid) things the last time around. This time I'm more determined to represent my feelings, so I dedicated an entire article to the discussion of why exactly I have exalted Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell to the very top of my personal bookshelf. So, here it is —

he has outsoared the shadow of our night;

The reason I love Strange & Norrell more than (almost) any other novel is that I consider it to be the English version of Huckleberry Finn. I don't mean that Susanna Clarke set out intentionally to write her own interpretation of Huckleberry Finn, or that she was at all influenced by Twain's novel, or that, as a natural consequence of writing a story about black people and white people interacting together in the 19th century, against your wishes you get a version of Huckleberry Finn whether you like it or not. What I mean is that, in the way people dishonestly say that Strange & Norrell is Harry Potter for grown-ups, I'm saying Strange & Norrell is Huckleberry Finn for the English. More clearly: I think Finn is one of the world's great stories, patterned over and over in the Campbellian style across time and tide, and Strange & Norrell is its Anglotrophic incarnation. Twain chose to do his version in the voice of Huckleberry himself, whereas Clarke picked a philosophically interested party composing a history of English magic — but the material is exactly the same. Well, perhaps not exactly. Twain's book is about America, and American evil, and the American South, so it sounds and looks different from Clarke's book, which is about England, and English evil, and the English North. Twain was often accused of picaresqueness (and probably picturesqueness, too) in Finn, long after that would've been a legitimate criticism, because of his use of dialect and what we call "local color" — fictional depictions of the colloquial folklore and social peculiarities of any feature of the American landscape that does not happen to be New York City [1]. Clarke, on the other hand, does just the same things in just the same way but manages to avoid a similar stereotype (at least in the US; I don't know if British critics are dismissive of her focus on Yorkshire or not) (I trend toward "not") [2].

Both Twain and Clarke describe the casual poison of the Western socioeconomic class system — Twain explicitly, by referring to it derogatorily through Huckleberry as "sivilization," and describing in loving physical detail how it allowed slavery to become an institution (slavery was first a convenience and then a convention, and of course polite society is comfortable with everything conventional), Clarke through shrewd insinuation, by very carefully showing her readers in exactly what way each character is turned into an uglier version of himself by his reliance on a gentleman's code of bloodless, dehumanizing conduct [3]. Both Twain and Clarke establish as a primary hero a black man universally despised and ignored by his white peers — but Clarke describes Stephen Black, a well-educated high-ranking servant, freed by English law and therefore more keenly able to feel the indifferent bigotry of his fellow citizens, and Twain created Jim, an uneducated slave who's impossibly kind-hearted, but so ignorant he actually believes his 'good fortune' is the result of his involvement in the rituals of otherworldly magic. Both Twain and Clarke take as their protagonist a wild, illiterate, and tempestuous young man with pale skin and black hair, who starts life in either a type of poverty adjacent to slavery or in slavery itself, who disdains the traditions of his chosen culture and works to change the world. Clarke, being English, promotes her character to the heights of a star among the heavens, a silent but attentive king of the very air and darkness. Twain, being American, is intrinsically suspicious of absolute rule and the rapacity of any kind of faith, so he confines his own character to the earth, of whose trustworthiness he can be more certain. The novels take their characters through different-looking landscapes, put them through different types of adversity, and thus require them to visit a different-looking set of narrative miseries upon their readers, but in the most substantial way they are shockingly similar.

Their endings, for example, are rather identical.

Near the end of Huckleberry's story, he resolves to write a letter to Jim's owner (Jim, of course, has run away down the Mississippi River with Huck, and their precarious adventure is the substance of the novel) detailing Jim's whereabouts. Huckleberry is barely literate himself, but the letter-writing takes something out of him beyond its physical difficulty. Having lived with Jim for so long Huck is loath to return him to captivity, despite the fact that Huck's culture tells him that is the only right thing to do. In Huckleberry's white Christian America, Jim is literally nothing but a possession. So Huck struggles gravely with what he knows is right and with its shadowy companion, what he has been taught to believe is right. He would like to pray to relieve the conflict in his soul, but finds he can't:

[After writing the letter] I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray, now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking; thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, stead of calling me — so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll go to hell" — and tore it up.

So, to distinctly classify the things that happen in that scene — and those that happen further on beyond the quote, at the end of the novel:
1.) The white, power-wielding, 'uneducated' protagonist recognizes the intrinsic humanity of the powerless black protagonist, and defines him as an equal.
☓ Huckleberry remembers Jim's kindness and nobility, which prevents him from betraying Jim — which he believes to be the appropriate course of action.
2.) Water is identified as the medium of remembrance.
☓ Huck recalls that he and Jim have spent their last few months together floating on a raft down the Mississippi River with their lives in one another's hands.
3.) The white protagonist's written words are destroyed.
☓ Huck writes and then tears up the letter that would return Jim to slavery. Instead of turning Jim in as a runaway slave, Huckleberry writes a book about their experiences together.
4.) The white character breaks the bonds that tie him to conventional society, and eventually departs for some unknown, 'uncivilized' territory — perhaps, as he says, for hell.
☓ Huckleberry decides to take his chances on damnation and solitude, if it means relegating his only friend to life as a slave. He declares: "All right, I'll go to hell!" He departs for the Western Territories.
5.) The freshly empowered black character also gives up his potentially elevated place in the ordinary structure of society and strikes out on his own.
☓ Although Jim is given a small sum of money and the documents he needs to prove his citizenship, rather than starting a new life as a freeman he instead chooses to leave the temporary protection he's found and return home to buy his family out of slavery.

Although Clarke isn't self-sacrificing enough to put it all into one paragraph, I think it's still recognizable:

When Stephen and the gentleman [4] are preparing to kill Lady Pole with magic (or, while the gentleman is preparing to do it, and Stephen is preparing to watch in impotent horror), something strange happens to Stephen:

...and everything changed. The sun came out from behind a cloud; it shone through the winter trees; hundreds of small, bright patches of sunlight appeared. The world became a kind of puzzle or labyrinth... [and] Stephen hardly dared take another step. If he did so — if, for example, he stepped into that shadow or that spot of light, then the world might be forever altered.

[...]

The bare branches against the sky were a kind of writing and, though he did not want to, he could read it. He saw that it was a question put to him by the trees.

"Yes," he answered them.

Their age and their knowledge belonged to him.

Stephen accepts command of the soil, the water, the stones, and all the birds of northern England. He accepts the fealty of the sunlight and the shadows. For a moment, he becomes king of all the earth. In that moment, he turns the whole world against the gentleman, trapping him beneath the water of a nearby brook and crushing him under the weight of tons of stone — killing him and shattering his magic forever. Stephen saves everyone in the story in a single instant, including himself. And although this act of domination is brought about by the activities of Strange and Norrell, who are attempting to summon the Raven King, it's transparently obvious that the force which powers the magical transaction is the king himself.

When next we see him, Stephen hears Lady Pole, who shared his terrible enchantment, calling out his name:

"I cast off the name of my captivity," he said. "It is gone." He picked up the crown, the sceptre and orb [prescient gifts from the gentleman], and began to walk.

He had no notion of where he was going. [...] He could never go home — if home it had been in the first place. [...] Stephen had done with England and England had done with him. He walked on.

Stephen goes immediately to the fairy kingdom called Lost-hope — which, free of the gentleman, is probably not called "Lost-hope" anymore — and becomes its king:

[One of Stephen's new fairy subjects says:] "Lost-hope is changing! The old King is dead. The new King approaches! And at his approach the world sheds its sorrow. The sins of the old King dissolve like morning mist! The world assumes the character of the new. His virtues fill up the wood and the wold!"

"The new King?" The person who had once been Stephen Black looked down at his own hands. In one was the sceptre and in the other the orb.

The fairy smiled at him, as if wondering why he should be surprized. "The changes you wrought here far surpass any thing you did in England."

Of course, Stephen has been caught up in the Raven King's prophecy like a fish in a net, and in it he takes the Raven King's own position as "the nameless slave" who "becomes king in a strange country." Their poles are exactly reversed, though; Stephen is a nameless slave in England, and he leaves it to become a fairy king, and the Raven King started out a slave in a fairy kingdom who went on to conquer England. But, in the material events of the narrative, and out of all mankind, John Uskglass chose Stephen Black — a man most Englishmen would have a difficult time regarding as genuinely human — to be his heir, and, for a moment, his equal.

And while Stephen is busy accepting the kingship of Lost-hope, other important events are occurring elsewhere. In a nearby moor occupied only by a single hawthorn tree, the evil gentleman has hung Vinculus, who is the Raven King's living word. John Childermass, who is a former servant and a magician himself, finds him and cuts him down, and plans to carry off Vinculus's corpse so that he can transcribe its complicated system of writing for posterity. He is, however, interrupted:

He turned back to make sure that all was right with the body. Someone — a man — was bending over it. He shoved the pistols into the pockets of his greatcoat and began to run, calling out.

[Childermass confronts the man, who looks wealthy and well-groomed but whose hair, it bears mentioning, is much longer than a gentleman would wear it.]

Out loud he said, "The body is mine, sir! Leave it be!"

The man looked up. "Yours, John Childermass?" he said with a mildly ironic air, "I thought it was mine."

It was a curious thing but despite his clothes and his air of cool authority, his speech sounded uncouth — even to Childermass's ears.

[...]

"Move away from the body, sir!" cried Childermass. "I will not ask you again!"

The man did not even trouble to look up. He passed the tip of his finger over the body as if he were writing upon it.

[In an attempt to dissuade the strange man from taking or harming Vinculus's body, Childermass fires his pistols at him.]

[...] But the lead refused to fly. It hung in the air as if in a dream. It twisted, swelled and changed shape. Suddenly it put forth wings, turned into a lapwing, and flew away. In the same instant Childermass's mind grew as quiet and fixed as a stone.

The man moved his finger over Vinculus and all the patterns and symbols flowed and swirled as if they had been written upon water. He did this for a while and when he was satisfied, he stopped and stood up.

"You are wrong," he said to Childermass. "He is not dead." He came and stood directly before Childermass. With as little ceremony as a parent who cleans something from a child's face, the man licked his finger and daubed a sort of symbol on each of Childermass's eye-lids, on his lips and over his heart. Then he gave Childermass's left hand a knock, so that the pistol fell to the ground. He drew another symbol on Childermass's palm. He turned and seemed about to depart, but glancing back and apparently as an afterthought, he made a final gesture over the cut on Childermass's face.

The wind shook the falling snow and made it spin and twist about. Brewer [Childermass's horse] made a sound as if something had disturbed him. Briefly, the snow and the shadows seemed to form a picture of a thin, dark man in a greatcoat and boots. The next moment the illusion was gone.

To review:
1.) The white, power-wielding, 'uneducated' protagonist recognizes the intrinsic humanity of the powerless black protagonist, and defines him as an equal.
☓ The Raven King, who never really learned to read and write and speak like other English people, assigns to Stephen Black, who is both cruelly enchanted by a fairy and cruelly treated by nearly all white Englishmen, his very own place in the spell that restores magic to England.
2.) Water is identified as the medium of remembrance.
☓ There are two main choices here, for the memory of water: It could either be represented by Stephen's use of his new-found power over the mountain stream to imprison the gentleman in order to kill him, or by Stephen's birth at sea on the slave-ship Penlaw, which is the name of the place the Raven King first entered England — Stephen's birth being the first moment at which the Raven King entered his life.
3.) The white protagonist's written words are destroyed.
☓ The Raven King returns to England for the purpose of dissolving the contents of his old book and writing a new one.
4.) The white character breaks the bonds that tie him to conventional society, and eventually departs for some unknown, 'uncivilized' territory — perhaps, as he says, for hell.
☓ Having finished his spell, the Raven King leaves England and returns to his third and apparently favorite kingdom, Agrace, which is "thought to lie on the far side of Hell."
5.) The freshly empowered black character also gives up his potentially elevated place in the ordinary structure of society and strikes out on his own.
☓ Stephen leaves England and becomes a fairy king.

My favorite part, in both novels. [5]

If anything, Clarke's depiction of Stephen Black is even more exacting and humane than Twain's treatment of Jim, who is to a large degree a generous, noble cipher. But, Twain was writing at a time when blacks weren't widely considered to be real living people, so his use of a virtuous black stereotype was actually quite controversial. Very few readers in 1884 would have wanted to open a novel and see a black male character who was neither a joke, a monster, nor a martyr.

There are, in fact, even further similarities between the novels: the mirror-like personification of weather and the wilderness, the fact that John Uskglass and Huckleberry Finn both descend from a widely-despised immigrant class (Uskglass is ostensibly Norman French; Finn is the offspring of 'black' Irish immigrants) [6], the systematic deconstruction of characters bearing the insignia of royalty, the importance of folk magic to people left behind by social progress — and notice, for example, near the end of Huck Finn that Tom Sawyer, who represents everything right and proper in a nascent Southern gentleman, is nearly as fond of his watch fob as is a disgraced Drawlight. But, that would be a feature-length essay, and a little overwhelming at the moment. (Maybe one day, though.)

To finish, I want to say that there are dozens of important stories that changed the way I saw myself and the world, but the one I found first, liked best, and used most is Huckleberry Finn. It's been my mirror and my shield. Every moment of my life I consider how much of myself I can bargain away to civilization before I become some other, more horrible person. I read Huckleberry Finn for the first time when I was very young, long before I learned to be literate; my love for the character and the story predates my knowledge of love as an emotion, or my notion of myself as a person who loves things. When I fancied that I saw the qualities that make Huckleberry Finn so very beautiful peeking out from under the ancient majesties of the Raven King, I was overwhelmed by what I understand, looking back at it, was certainly happiness. At the time, though, the realization was almost painful. I felt as though Susanna Clarke had effortlessly healed the injury that characterizes the end of Twain's epic narrative — Twain was too furious and heartbroken to consider returning Huckleberry to the world for even an instant, but Clarke was able to do it perfectly and cleanly, and magnify both in the process. I tend to have difficulty dealing with that kind of subversive optimism, on even a theoretical basis; wretched as I often find it, at least I can recognize Twain's literary topography. I'm not entirely sure I would know what to do with a changed world.

But, I suppose there isn't much chance I'll have to worry about it, is there? In this brand new novel about an old world I've never even seen, I watched as everything I've ever known and loved was transformed beneath the unclouded tides of foreign magic. And truly, I felt as though I was watching real magic itself, commonplace and vital, unfolding upon the pages. Despite its exotic settings and unfamiliar ideas, I have found Strange & Norrell as comfortable and inviting as the shadows under the trees in the house where I was born. After all, you might say I've been there before.


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