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A common theme in fantasy worldbuilding is that once there was a Golden Age, but now the magic has vanished or is draining away. The Elves have departed. The Gods have been slain. The Mysteries have been forgotten. So prevalent is this trope that the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy has a specific term for it: thinning”). It describes that feeling evoked by worlds that used to be fuller or richer, brimming with magic, mystery and wonder. But by some mysterious force or process, they have become emptier, flatter, greyer. In a word: thinner.

We saw thinning at work in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, where the plot centred on an attempt to restore a lost magic to England. But the example most fantasy readers will be familiar with is J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The Middle Earth walked by Frodo and Sam is a world where the most titanic struggles have already been fought, the mightiest empires have risen and fallen, the gods have walked the earth and retreated. Everything in The Lord of the Rings, from Lothlórien and Gondor all the way to Sauron himself, is a shadow of a grander age. The Lord of the Rings is at least in part a novel about how to move on in a world literally set in the ruins of the past.

The world of Martha Well’s Witch King has similarly thinned, but here there is no mystery about why the world is emptier than it once was. It is thinner because invaders from across the sea landed on its shores and massacred everyone and everything. Witch King is not a story of melancholic longing for some imagined but lost Englishness, but a direct reckoning with the effects of genocide, trauma, and loss, and what happens to those left alive to move on from it.

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Warning: Contains spoilers

Fantasy has a subgenre that asks itself “what if history, but with magic?”, and within that subgenre there is a peculiar penchant for novels set during the British Regency era with its High Society romances and the thrill of the Napoleonic Wars. Bridgerton with Dragons, if you will. Because after all, what is more dashing than a well-bred aristocrat wizard wearing the uniform of His Majesty’s Royal Navy?

Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell falls within this genre, but takes a deeper approach than adding magical creatures to a romance or adventure story. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, it tells the story of the two titular magicians and their efforts to restore magic, specifically English magic, to the world. The novel’s 900+ pages of high society salons, the Peninsular War and expeditions to elven lands are quite possibly less about magic, and more about what does or does not define Englishness. Clarke’s novel almost feels like an incantation itself, a magical tome containing an intricate spell to conjure up a lost England for the reader.

Powerful spells require excellent concentration and superb command of one’s ingredients however, and this is where Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell does not always have the wizardry required. It is a daunting undertaking to sustain pace and dramatic tension across hundreds of pages, and at times Clarke does not succeed at this. But it is the ending where for me the story unravelled and the spell broke. There is much to enjoy in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, in particular for fans of the English classics, but the finale did not deliver the magical fireworks that its premise promised.

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“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living,” s_aid Karl Marx. And while he had the proletariat in mind rather than the aristocracy, the words might have been the motto of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy. Published between 1946 and 1959, Gormenghast gets classed as prototypical fantasy. Nowadays, it might have been labelled magical realism, suffused as the entire series is with the logic of dreams, where time, space and fate all bend in service of the story.

All three books follow Titus Groan, Seventy-Seventh Earl, first as child, then as youth and finally as a young man. Yet the main character of the novel is not Titus, but the eponymous castle of Gormenghast. Gormenghast is the ur-castle of our European collective imagination: so vast, complex and ruinous that even its lifelong inhabitants cannot fathom it. It is miles of crumbling ramparts and towers, battlements and courtyards, corridors and chambers, arrested in a permanent state of slow decay. Think the castle from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, except if it was 20 times larger and designed by M.C. Escher. It would eat Hogwarts for breakfast.

As labyrinthine as the castle are the rituals of the House of Groan. They are the sediment of contingent decisions and events of generations of Groans, ossified into strictures that lock the castle’s inhabitants down in time in the same way the physical castle contains them in space. It is the rituals and the castle together that hold the essence of the House of Groan. Any living members of the line are incidental. As a metaphor for any old, impoverished, anachronistic aristocratic English family, stuck on a decrepit estate surrounded by mouldering artifacts of a glorious past, it could not do any better.