This had been vaguely on my radar for a while (I have a friend who rates it among his favorites, I tried Piranesi when it was eligible for the Hugos in 2022), and then I saw it recced for Epistolary (there are letters and in-universe documentation, although they're a relatively small fraction of the book, as well as lots of footnotes). So, sure, I'll try.
The first and most important thing is that, on my e-reader, when you click to expand a footnote, it pops up at the bottom of the page, and sometimes it might continue onto a second screen.
But it only displays a single paragraph. If the footnote is multiparagraph--and some of them are quite extensive--you have to click through to "jump to footnotes" to read it all. You wouldn't know there was more to it! Sometimes it just stops abruptly, but since some footnotes are nothing more or less than a "bibliographic" reference to a nonexistent book, you can't always tell whether another footnote is really just a one-liner or if there's more. It's 2025, I feel like we should have figured this out by now.
The second thing to say is that my e-reader edition came to 850 pages (but all of the footnotes are "on" page 850). This is not the only version of the book. One edition runs to 782 pages, another to 1006. You should probably be aware of this! Now, many of you are going to say, "if you're the type of person who picks up an 850-page fantasy novel for fun, 1006 is not that much different than 850." Which is true. But, perhaps because of bingo gamification, I like to know how to pace myself and know what I'm getting into. Unfortunately, I'm not confident that it was worth the time investment for me--it felt like less than the sum of its parts.
To its credit, the book is droll in a Dickensian way, in that everyone is kind of spectacularly missing the point. There's an insufferable toady who says things like "Isn't it such a shame that this woman died so young? D: She was going to be married! And her husband would have been given
a thousand pounds a year! Alas, alas..." If you love to hate characters like that, there are plenty of hateable characters who get terrible comeuppances.
Unfortunately, the titular characters aren't easy to root for. Jonathan Strange only gets interested in magic because a prophecy said he would, and he wants to have a steady job to convince the woman he's crushing on that he's marriageable material. Mr Norrell tries to have a monopoly on magic and then is surprised when other people resent him for it, and his only "friends" are the insufferable toadies. There are sympathetic characters who are kidnapped by powerful magical forces, but whenever they try to talk about it or explain their problems, they're cursed to babble nonsense, so there's not much room to exert agency.
One of the big themes is that the characters are trying to restore
English magic. There used to be a powerful magician in early medieval times named John Uskglass, aka the Raven King, who was raised in Faerie lands and eventually became a king of northern England. So there's a lot of "we're trying to bring back magic that was as powerful as Uskglass had access to, instead of just reading about it in books." (The "what are the political implications of England having another king" are kind of teased at but never really fleshed out.) The English characters travel throughout Europe and do magic on their country's behalf elsewhere during the Napoleonic Wars. Are we supposed to believe that magic is thriving elsewhere? Do other countries have their own versions of John Uskglass who have also abandoned them? Is England the only magical places because that's where the faeries hang out? This doesn't really get resolved.
To some extent, there are themes of "rich white men are oblivious, everyone else is actually having stuff happen." A servant literally takes a bullet for his employer but gets taken for granted; a woman kidnapped by the faerie powers is like "oh, my husband doesn't really love me, he only loves his books" while he's trying to move heaven and earth to rescue her. The contrast between "scholars who just stare at books all day" and "people who live in the real world and have emotions and do stuff" is not something I enjoy.
On the other hand, Stephen Black, a black man who works as a butler, commands the respect of his colleagues and it's like, "they subconsciously respond to his charisma and good looks by assuming he's actually a long-lost prince and will someday return to rule his homeland as a king." Which is hilarious, in a "reverse Nigerian prince scam" kind of way! Then a magical fairy meets him and has the exact same reaction--"you're dignified and handsome, obviously king material, QED." I enjoyed this part.
I was hoping for a reveal of "two aliases, same character." Like, maybe Norrell was the Raven King all along, and his fear of summoning up the Raven King is because he's terrified of what he used to be and doesn't ever want to go back to it? (I've been spoiled by "Warbreaker.") But no. And maybe the whole thing was just the Raven King playing 5D chess, but like...there's no one in the book who can match him, it isn't clear why he would have to resort to 5D chess. It's suggested that Norrell has just been sitting around and trying to get famous and hobnob with important people at the beginning of the story, but it takes Segundus' asking him "hey, you're a magician, could we see some of your books," to be the inciting incident, and it's like...again, straining credulity that it takes so long.
Likewise, the narrator occasionally breaks the fourth wall to be like "Mr Norrell (a less fanciful person than I)", and I wanted this to tie together--is the narrator also one of the minor characters, is this a whole in-universe document? But no luck on that front either. The footnotes are more of the same, including plenty of droll ones, but they're not as witty as Pratchett, and it wasn't clear what the dividing line between footnotes and the "main plot" was.
Enjoyed trying to spot the gratuitous "this must really be Clarke's id" stuff, both based on having read part of Piranesi and not. Like, there's an elaborate description of paintings of Venice that aren't really plot-relevant, hundreds of pages before elaborate descriptions of Venice proper. Labyrinths are a favorite motif, shades of Borges. Even Piranesi's RL namesake gets namedropped.
The title is not a typo: "Mr" has no period in British English. (Neither does "St".) On the other hand, she's trying to use period-typical spellings, so "chuse" rather than "choose," "any body" as two words, "sopha" for "sofa..." If it was rewritten in 21st century US English, I wonder whether the character count would grow or shrink or what. Probably not enough to make up a 156 page difference.
Parallels to other books: same era as Lord Byron and the scholarly parliamentarians of
The Difference Engine, Mary Shelley and the crew behind
Frankenstein get namedropped, more "why did Napoleon lose the Battle of Waterloo???" fodder for the time travelers in
To Say Nothing of the Dog.
Mr Norrell tries to stop people from accessing a book published by Strange, and it kind of backfires on him. From the footnotes:
The letter contained two implications which were considered particularly offensive: first, that the purchasers were not clever enough to understand Strange’s book; and second, that they did not possess the moral judgement to decide for themselves if the magic Strange was describing was good or wicked.
Turns out when you condescend to people all the time and not only insult their intelligence but also tell them they don't know what's good for them, they don't like you. WHO KNEW. Good observation of human nature.
Here's some great excerpts from an in-universe book review:
...one of the generals had the original notion of replacing the Cavalry’s horses with unicorns. In this way it was hoped to grant the soldiers the power of goring Frenchmen through their hearts. Unfortunately, this excellent plan was never implemented since, far from finding unicorns in sufficient number for the Cavalry’s use, Mr NORRELL and Mr STRANGE have yet to discover a single one.
...
MERLIN...was upon his mother’s side Welsh and upon his father’s Infernal, he will scarcely do for that pattern of respectable English Magic upon which PORTISHEAD, NORRELL and STRANGE have set their hearts.
The buildup to Waterloo was another hilarious chapter. Saving a Belgium town from being captured by teleporting it to America. Annoying birdsongs that later became children's skipping rhymes. I wish the whole thing had been that engaging.
Bingo: probably using it for epistolary, although again, that was a relatively small proportion of the contents. Definitely counts for A Book In Parts. Argument could be made for some level of Impossible Places, although to much less of an extent than Piranesi.
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