By now we all know that the Harry Potter novels failed pretty spectacularly on re-entry, making this essay completely irrelevant. I have never been one to let complete irrelevance stop me, however, so you can just assume that this page ceases to describe the Potter franchise around the end of the third fourth fifth book, when they stopped being worth the effort. Also, re: narrative lies and the lying liars who tell them, Rowling finished the series with the worst lie of all time: "All was well." This was perhaps an attempt (successful) to annoy me personally.
So, this is the part where I tell you why comparing any of Susanna Clarke's fiction to the Harry Potter series is the dumbest imaginable thing not directly related to vampires that anyone could ever do. First, and obviously: It's not as though Strange & Norrell is the book Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone might one day grow up to be. This would be like calling Goodnight Moon a child's introduction to Khalil Gibran. That would be silly, and wrong. I suppose Potter and S&N might be considered complimentary in the very broadest sense, since both combine elements of history and fantasy to describe the perpetual conflicts created by human frailty — but really, of what decently-written novel of any genre could that not be said? And I suppose they are a little similar, texturally; Potter and S&N both make liberal use of Chekov's gun, for example, but Clarke is a hair-splitting assassin and Rowling rides into town dragging ten hot howitzers per reader. There's also compelling evidence that the saga of Potter's witches and wizards might fulfill the major criteria for inclusion in the world's long of list of fairy Romances; but, for me, everything human in those stories was too incompletely depicted to say for certain. Whereas there is nothing really to debate about the essential fairyness of Clarke's fairies. I don't think I've seen fairies who were more concretely fairy-like in my life. Furthermore, the universes in which S&N and Potter take place have no shared territory beyond being visibly English. And even further than that, the prose generated by Clarke and Rowling respectively couldn't be less alike if each novel originated in a different language. There's not one thing that genuinely connects these two pieces of fiction to one another, except possibly that stupid word — "magic" — which means something different every time someone says it. For instance...
Harry Potter isn't really about magic. This is, I would think, potentially very obvious to nearly anyone who has read three or more books, total, ever. There are a couple of ways you can tell that Harry Potter isn't a story in which the demystification of magic is the goal, but I think the most readily accessible evidence is that, in the Potterverse, magic is powerless against death [1]. Utterly. It can't erase death, or even change it. Death is eternal and non-negotiable. The shroud cannot be lifted. Death is, of course, in fiction and in reality one of only two moments at which ordinary humans are allowed to see and use magic; because Rowling's books don't really have much to do with magic themselves, she sensibly lets real magic have its way in the matter. Since the world she shows her readers is meant to be only a very thinly transmuted rendition of the world they live in themselves, allowing one of her characters to transgress permanently against death would register practically as a lie. Rowling's Potter novels don't seem to contain lies — at least not structurally.
The other way you can tell that Harry Potter isn't about magic is that magic isn't really very significant, even inside the books themselves. Most of Rowling's magic is flashy and commercial, and doesn't do much to alter the quality of life for her characters. They're still victimized by poverty, disease, and bureaucracy, not to mention world-shattering evil. Their magic can't even cure the common cold. As the story progresses, it becomes increasingly obvious that the wizardly world isn't important because it's full of wizards. The fact that Rowling's magical characters ride around on broomsticks and automate the washing of their dirty dishes with a wand is cheerfully and charmingly incidental. Our real motivation for watching the magic folk is their love for Harry Potter, a character who in the England of his fiction is the least important person ever. In the version of reality to which he is abandoned, Potter is a homeless, penniless, unremarkable orphan — but to the magic-using world he's The Boy Who Lived, their savior. They're important because they know he's important, and they have been designed to display the fact to all of us who read about and love Harry ourselves. Muggles aren't meant to look stupid because we can't toast our bread with fire spells or defeat Hungarian Horntails in single-handed combat; we're stupid because we don't even know how to recognize the messiah when he's delivered to us on the doorstep like a bottle of milk. The Harry Potter novels are very truly children's books, which is why they've grown with their audience, and will grow in consecutive reiteration with every new crop of children who read them. I'm not sure why so many people seem to think there's something unsavory about that. If you ask me, speaking to children in ways they can understand is probably the most dreadful and significant duty a book could ever undertake. These are novels designed to teach children how to be decent and compassionate, how to recognize real value when everyone around you overestimates the market price of gimcracks, how to battle the lassitude of ordinariness, and how to care for yourself and others even though circumstances may one day make that nearly impossible. Of course, it's quite hard to sell a screw-top bottle of decency to a nine-year-old, so it's generally the magic that you hear about from Potter publishers, publicists, freakishly-obsessed fans, and film property management. Muggles, all of them.
However. Strange & Norrell and all of Clarke's other fiction, as well as the marvelous world in which it is set, isn't for children — critics are indeed right about that. Accidentally, I think, but they're right. Clarke's prose would probably not be readily accessible to a twelve-year-old. Not because it's dense and overwritten, as most child-proof fiction tends to be, but because it's 'complete.' There is no point of entry for someone who lacks the adult ability to understand and disbelieve the subtext-grade deceit that's often the only evidence of a real fairy tale. Clarke's narrators are generally very subtle and tricksy. They aren't really the naively ironical speakers recognizable from vast chunks of English literature, nor are they (generally) insane or mentally deficient. They're just fundamentally untrustworthy for their own strange, subterranean reasons. For example, there is the puzzling, ambivalent characterization of fairies in Clarke's fiction; her narrators agree universally on the utter personal worthlessness of fairies and warn readers that they are dangerous, difficult, deranged, and not to be trifled with or trusted. In most cases, the stories in which fairies appear go on to describe the incredible usefulness of fairy magic, which seems to be the basis upon which most 'human' magic is predicated, portraying fairies practically as powerful, crafty, and necessary. In Strange & Norrell, Gilbert Norrell offers an explanation for the basis of this human-fairy conflict: he thinks it's a consequence of the extra-devious efforts of the Raven King to inextricably weld his two constituencies together. Whatever the origin of the hostilities, though, the result is a kind of oddly off-balanced and complicated portrait of a culture of magicians who seem to despise and fear, not without cause, that which they desperately need [2]. Certainly neither Strange nor Norrell has much luck in their adventures with fair(y)ies, and, for that matter, neither do any of the novel's other characters. Which is quite an odd discrepancy, but in a very strange way also extremely realistic-looking. If there's anything that characterizes all races and classes and cultures of people equally, it's the extreme ambivalence they feel toward anyone 'foreign' — and no one could be more foreign to everyone than a fairy. Speaking of foreignness and ambivalence, though, Clarke's narrators themselves share many of the less comfortable fairy stereotypes. They are dynamic and demanding. They force us to participate in events as they happen, or we'll be left behind, trying to sort out the evasions from the misdirections. The voices through which Clarke narrates her fiction aren't meant to speak to us directly as they might do with children, enunciating clearly the things we ought to understand. Instead, in tones both familiar and peculiar, they preside over stories that are as transparent and deceptive as a depth of clear water [3].
When it comes to content, Clarke is all about magic. Inside her stories, magic is really real and really important. As you would expect, in Clarke's England death can be successfully coaxed into submission by the practiced magician. The gentleman with the thistle-down hair has no trouble performing resurrection. The Raven King, an allegedly human character, at one point deals death a killing blow right in front of the reader. Although, I should say that this difficulty isn't clearly resolved; bringing back the dead is described as being exclusively a type of fairy-magic, explaining both the Raven King and the gentleman's use of it, but during Strange's time in the Napoleonic Wars he is able, without otherworldly assistance, to reanimate some unfortunate deceased Italian soldiers. He isn't nearly as good at returning them to the grave, however, although the book's narrator herself knows and publishes the secret of killing dead men [4]. I'm not quite sure under what circumstances human magicians can bring people back from the dead, or prevent death from visiting, in Clarke's England — in the text magicians are described summoning people who died centuries ago, for example, but the visitors remain spirits and can only be held for a short time, and in most cases only in the context of a magical dream-state — and, then again, the Raven King is close to 800 years old when the main story takes place and is (when the mood strikes him) a visceral, corporeal being. Also, despite his power over death, the gentleman with the thistle-down hair is eventually murdered. So although I'm unclear on the rules that govern the intersection of death and magic in Clarke's fiction, I know they intersect cleanly and repeatedly.
Next, there's the dismaying unfamiliarity of that mysterious England Clarke imagines, the strange but recognizable place where all this wonderful stuff happens. I mentioned earlier that Rowling's world is only a superficial fictional transmutation — Clarke, on the other hand, produces a complete thaumaturgical metamorphosis, by including history in her process. Historical novels already utilize a peculiar type of sorcery in the first place, since they force their readers to imagine the shape and dimensions of a world that has never been touched by, say, electricity, or mass media, or Freudianism. (I have found that, for my own part, doing this is nearly impossible.) Still, Clarke goes a step further: If that old, foreign world had in some way been altered by something so powerful that the contact changed it irrevocably, what would a modern reader have to envision to complete the image? How would our understanding of faith change if magic could could prove there's a heaven and a hell, while also suggesting that they are entirely mundane places which could feature tourist attractions like museums, as well as available real estate? How would magic interact with technology and science, a discipline that was just beginning to develop its current form at the time Clarke sets the stage for the renewal of working magic? Who would need a telephone or the internet, if precise divination could be done at any time by anyone? If delusions can be easily dispelled by the magic of bees, for what purpose would psychiatry exist? If disease could be personified and banished from the body like a demon, would surgery have developed into a medical art? Modern thought tends to associate practical magic with ancient times, with countries that flourished thousands of years ago, with cultures so ignorant that mysticism substituted for everything from medicine to entertainment. So then, what if that frightening, primeval power trespassed into the history we very seriously regard as the genesis of our contemporary world?
Those aren't a child's questions.
Lastly, I don't think that Clarke's fiction is really about 'us,' as Rowling's seems to be. Rather, I believe that Clarke writes about the specific, unearthly intrusion of an enormous and frightening force on the story of our past, and into everything we find familiar, from the shadows and images we cast on the plethora of enigmatically reflective objects that populate our homes to the very earth itself. She rewrites history not from the ground up as other authors have tried to do, but instead from the disturbingly credible point of entry afforded by the not-quite-believable break that occurred between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Everything good and valuable about Clarke's magic comes from outside the human self — or, rather, it involves the frightening marriage of intrinsic mortal qualities and the mercurial tempers of the alien forces of nature. The return of that magic at the end of Strange & Norrell amounts to the opening of England, once again, to an invasion of foreign and potentially maleficent agents. The things which magic summons to the human heart and mind are the curiously attractive qualities of wild animals, as we see in The Ladies, the companionship of those deeply disturbing fairies, and/or the entirely perplexing person of the Raven King, whose presence appears to incorporate elements of both. Using magic in the England of Strange & Norrell involves letting go of the familiar, coupled with a conscious desire to embrace not just the unknown, but the fundamentally terrifying.
To put it simply, to me, the distinction looks like this: Rowling's Harry Potter novels seem to be attractive, didactic stories which teach us what we ought to see when we look in the mirror. Clarke's fiction, on the other hand, is far more about what might be looking back.
[1] I am aware that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is indeed named for magical artifacts that allow Harry mortals to avoid the inevitable hazards of death, but I would argue that not only are these objects cargo on the Deus Ex Machina Express, they seem to have been designed exclusively to provide a fortuitous resurrection experience for one Mister Harry Potter, Esquire — and therefore are a specific part of the fabric of Potter's good/evil prophecy, and not the material of the everyday mythology used in the rest of the novel. For example, extraordinary transgressions against the divine order or not, they don't seem to have done my brave old friend Severus Snape much good.
[2] This is the official party line, but I'm not convinced it's anywhere near the truth. The human social structures depicted in Strange & Norrell are just as esoteric and loony-looking as fairy culture, despite their more banal intentions. I think, as far as the book is concerned, we're all really meant to be six of one and a half dozen of the other. Also, fairies have the excuse of living on the other side of the mirror; of course we're going to look odd to one another.
[3] Notice how often water fails to reflect the obvious in Clarke's fiction (along with other shiny surfaces). I think this is what they call a "motif."
[4] She is presumably not a fairy. I think.
