Being a voracious reader, having a big brick of a book over the holidays was a good start. And eat this, Harry Potter fans, Susannah Clarke’s novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell got me hooked for three days in a row. It deals with magic, dreamy written in a massive 19th-century -like tome. Clarke’s novel reads like Proust on mushrooms, and is an anachronistic oddity that switches off the real life out there for all seven hundred and eighty-two pages of Victorian writing.
This book is not for the faint of hearted. Jonathan Strange, the magician mentioned in the title, does not even make an appearance until page two hundred and eight.
It took me the better half of two nights, three steaming baths and a great bottle of Bordeaux to finish it off. It’s a great book, I’ll put it between Ulysses of James Joyce an God created the Integers of Hawkin: to re-read when I am retired J.
