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.

Witch King starts with demon Kaiisteron (Kai) and witch Ziede finding themselves imprisoned, but quickly liberated by the misguided attempts by an ‘expositor’ (i.e., a sorcerer) to enthral Kai. Thus inadvertently freed, Kai and Ziede must discover who betrayed them, and to what end, and what fate has befallen their friends and allies.

This situation creates a great amount of anxiety for both Kai and Ziede, and as the story progresses, we gradually find out why. Both were there when their world first burned, when their friends were slaughtered and their ways of life destroyed. Witch King is structured like braid, with alternating chapters set in the present and the past. It is from the past chapters that we learn that when Kai was young and had only recently crossed into the human world, a people called the Hierarchs came from across the sea and exterminated almost all the societies they encountered, saving only a few to be either subjugated or enslaved. In their war, the Hierarchs have two advantages over their enemies. First, their united forces, arrayed against a fragmented patchwork of city states, tribes and principalities that comprises Kai and Ziede’s world. Second a form of blood magic powered by death and suffering. It is the latter that allows the Hierarchs to wage the magical equivalent of nuclear warfare, making their merciless advance unstoppable.

The Hierarchs’ genocidal invasion has echoes of the Roman conquests of Gaul and Carthage or the arrival of conquistadors in the Americas, and it is probably no coincidence that the Hierarchs’ soldiers are called legionaries. The level of death and destruction is a clear departure from from Wells’ previous Murderbot Diaries series, which despite being set in a dystopian future did tend to see its heroes prevail over their adversaries. Not so in Witch King, where we watch with Kai as his people are massacred, his fellow demons imprisoned, and his connection to the Underearth severed.

Witch King is not a story about heroic resistance, but of loss and how to come to terms with it. The majority of the novel is set after first the invasion and then the defeat of the Hierarchs. The chapters set in the past tell us some of the events of the invasion, but here we are constrained by Kai’s own limited knowledge of what is happening, and that strand of the story terminating before we arrive at the successful counter-offensive against the Hierarchs.

The purpose of the ‘past’ chapters is therefore not to describe heroic battles, but to explain why ‘present’ Kai, Ziede and their allies are the way they are. Our heroes suffer from trauma and survivors guilt that expresses itself in panic, mistrust, and a reflexive tendency to deploy force or violence in defence of self or loved ones. Each of the characters who lived through the war is struggling to recover who they were, restrain the negative impulses they’ve developed due to what they’ve suffered, and to integrate their experiences into a new self that can move forward. There has been a profound break in the world of Witch King, and the novel put me in mind of The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin, which ends on this reflection:

“Sometimes a god comes,” Selver said. “He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.”

The inhabitants of Witch King were not as innocent or pacifist as the Althesians in Le Guin’s novella, but it is nonetheless implied that before the arrival of the Hierarchs, their communities coexisted mostly peacefully. It is therefore not only our heroes, but their entire society that has to come to terms with trauma and having been fundamentally altered. To defeat the Hierarchs, the fragmented city-states and other political entities that existed before the invasion were forced to unify into the an alliance called the Rising Worlds Coalition. But just as Le Guin’s Althesians could not put murder back into the dream-world, neither can Wells’ societies unlearn domination, autocracy and imperialism.

The search of Well’s characters for a new identity not governed by their traumatic experience is thus mirrored in the search of their communities for a future beyond mass death, war and domination. In both cases it involves internal conflict and work to unlearn reflexes forged in pain and despair. One of Kai’s key motivations is to prevent the Rising Worlds Coalition, which began as an alliance of independent states formed to fight the Hierarchs, from itself turning into a for mof empire. I was reminded of Hannah Proctor’s meditations on collective grief in Burnout, and how communities can be sundered by a trauma that, while shared, is nonetheless experienced uniquely individually. What is clear, is that Wells does not believe that simply putting the King back on the throne of Gondor is going to be a solution to anything.

The absence of the actual war of the Rising Worlds Coalition against the Hierarchs does leave an odd gap in Witch King’s worldbuilding, which is compounded by Kai’s ignorance throughout much of the ‘past’ chapters. We hence only gradually and incompletely discover the world’s lore, with Wells offering little in the form of exposition. The absence of characters launching into lengthy but implausible explanations makes for refreshingly natural reading, but combined with Wells’ creative approach to existing fantasy concepts and her invention of new ones, makes the story and the finer points of the lore hard to follow. Character abilities occasionally emerge just when they are convenient to progress the plot, lending a mild feel of deus ex machina to parts of the story, though unlike in for example Mal Goes to War, this did not impair the overall plausibility for me.

Witch King is an intriguing new direction for Wells, although it shares with the Murderbot Diaries the centrality of found family, the importance of trust, and the almost casual inclusion of diverse representations of gender, ethnicity, sexuality and disability. A crucial difference however is that where Murderbot’s journey of self-discovery starts almost from a blank slate at the point they gain autonomy, Kai’s journey is instead one of recovery after a cataclysmic rupture. It is a courageous decision to write a fantasy that focuses not on the ultimate battle, but the aftermath, with its painful work of reconstruction, reconnection and healing. In a world of ecological breakdown, warfare and genocide, these themes are more valuable than yet another simplistic triumph of good over evil. At the conclusion of Witch King there is therefore clearly more to do, and I am interested to see where Wells takes this story next.

Notes & Suggestions

• Anxiety, grief, loss, anger, and trauma are emotions that will, in varying degrees, be familiar to people organising in activist spaces, from marginalised communities, or who have simply been hurt by the world. Hannah Proctor taught us that none of us can be whole in a broken world, but that collective healing is a process that can sustain us. If you are struggling, seek assistance if it is available to you, but more importantly, reach out to friends, family or comrades that you trust. Readers in England and Wales can access Mind for support. Readers in Scotland can turn to SAMH.
• Readers who enjoyed Wells’ Murderbot Diaries may also enjoy Citizen Sleeper, a relatively short videogame exploring the same themes of community, the autonomy of constructed sentiences, and corporate dystopia.
• Perhaps surprisingly, Marvel’s Loki shares Witch King’s argument that the real work only starts after we defeat our enemies, while similarly engaging with themes of grief, despair, and recovery.

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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.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is built on an almost dialectical series of interconnected juxtapositions that start with the contrast between the two mages and spirals out from there. We are introduced first to Mr Norrell, a deeply insecure, narrow-minded and vindictive member of the minor gentry set outwith Society by virtue of both his status and personality. His deep-seated anxieties drive his contradictory impulses of wanting to restore English magic, while simultaneously sequestering any magical books he can find away in his private library lest anyone else might read them. Norrell is a man who craves intellectual companionship with the same strength with which he fears potential competition. It is a rare moment indeed when he overcomes his caution and takes on Jonathan Strange as his apprentice, who is psychologically the complete opposite of Norrell, the yang to Norrell’s yin. Equally riven by contradictory impulses, Strange oscillates between the insouciant and carefree nonchalance that only comes from being securely born as an aristocrat into high society, and obsessive fixation on whatever interest or task he has set himself. Strange takes up magic on a whim, but his unthinking self-confidence means ends up drawn far deeper into the mysteries of the art than Norrell.

Unbeknownst to themselves, both magicians find themselves in conflict with The Gentleman with Thistledown Hair. A faery with no regard for morality, honour or good manners, he represents the dark and wild side of English magic that Norrell seeks desperately to excise from his modern approach to magic, and to which Strange becomes fixedly attracted. Yet it is Norrell who first sets the Gentleman on a course against the magicians, by compelling him to assist in the resurrection of Lady Pole, a young woman, to secure Norrell’s access to the highest levels of government.

Together with various other characters orbiting the three magicians, Lady Pole represents a third juxtaposition within the novel, between the three mages and their collateral damage. For what unites Norrell, Strange and the Gentleman is a callous disregard for the consequence of their actions. Even though the three mages are constantly at odds with one another, they share a deep carelessness about other people: Norrell because he cares only for himself, Strange because he does not care for others, and the Gentleman because he cares not at all.

The characters hurt by the three mages represent various oppressed groups in Regency England: women, black slaves, the poor and working classes. Norrell’s bargain with the Gentleman to restore life to Lady Pole sees the latter lead a double life in the Faerie, leaving her exhausted and seemingly mad, to eventually be secluded away for the sake of propriety. Strange’s neglected and ignored wife Arabella is similarly enchanted, as is Stephen Black, black butler to the Pole household who is neither slave nor free man. And poor, working and even middle class magicians are excluded from the revival of English magic as it established as a gentlemanly pursuit.

And therein lies the final contradiction, for while Norrell, Strange and their Government Ministers dream of a thoroughly English magic for the modern age, the magic itself stubbornly refuses to conform to their aristocratic sensibilities. Magic was brought to England a thousand years earlier by the Raven King, a human foundling raised by faeries who conquered Northern England to establish his own kingdom. The Raven King’s magic is indeed English, but it is the magic of gnarled oaks in dark winter forests as much as of the green rolling hills in the imaginations of Norrell, Strange, and the past and present English upper classes, ensconced in their stately homes in the Home Counties. There is an obvious implied argument here that it is not just the magic, but Englishness itself that is much darker, older and wyrder than the national myth of the green and pleasant land and the people that own it. That England’s blasted moorlands, mountain crags and snow-covered forests, and the people that dwell there, have an equal claim to Englishness.

Breaking open the dominant notion of Englishness to make it more inclusive has merit, but the risk of an argument about the cultural self-conception of a specific part of a small island nation on the periphery of the Eurasian continent is that it becomes, well, insular. The outsized cultural influence of the Anglosphere notwithstanding, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell does not escape this inherent provincialism, and instead rather leans into it. In part this is because the debate at the heart of the book implies that magic is something uniquely English, there being no evidence or engagement with foreign magical practices past or present throughout the novel. On top of that, the style and format of the novel further reinforce its profoundly inward-looking nature. To pay homage to English Romance novels, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is written like a contemporaneous account of the novel’s events (footnotes included!), but the price of this is that despite Clarke’s possible misgivings about the English upper class, they still dominate the pages and provide our lens on the story’s events. Unable to escape their inbred sense of superiority, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is unfortunately suffused of the infamous “Heavy Fog in Channel – Continent Cut Off” mentality.

The centrality of upper class characters is also one of the reasons why Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell did not fully work for me as a narrative that attempts to bring marginalised groups back into the story, though I don’t dispute this is a possible reading. It is undoubtedly the case that the female and working class characters have more common sense and see things more clearly than either of the two titular magicians or the upper class characters who are frequently depicted as either incompetent, venal, or both. But with the exception of Mr Norrell’s manservant Childermass and the vagrant prophet-magician Vinculus, most of the marginalised characters have their agency curtailed either directly (as in the case of Lady Pole who is enchanted by the Gentleman) or indirectly (as in the case of Stephen Black who has no standing on account of his race). While they act as a foil for the arrogance of the wizards and their class, they do not exert their own power on events until the final part of the book, and even then their role is instrumental, but not directive.

This is is because as we approach the novel’s finale in the third act, we discover that Clarke chose to play with that most dangerous magic of all: prophecy. Jonathan Strange and Gilbert Norrell may believe they are directing the return of magic to England, but gradually it is revealed that they are mere ingredients in someone else’s spell. A spell by none other than John Uskglass, the Raven King himself, to restore his magic to England.

It is an intriguing development, falling somewhat short of a twist by virtue of serious foreshadowing, but it has the effect of collapsing the dramatic tension just as we approach the conclusion, For as soon as we know that events are preordained, the actions, agonising and arguments of the protagonists cease to be compelling. The outcome of the story may well be interesting, but it is so in the way of a game of chess: we might be invested in the outcome and the play, but nobody will enquire after the moods or motivations of the pieces.

For this reason I was ultimately also not persuaded by the thesis that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell emancipates its marginalised characters by moving them from periphery into the centre of the story. Because the centre of this story is empty, a void spun around the absent figure of the Raven King who turns out to have been pulling everyone’s strings all along. In a way, Clarke does manage to equalise the standing of her upper class magicians and her other characters, but it is done by reducing the former rather than elevating the latter.

As an argument about who magic belongs to, the denouncement of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell may work very well, but as a story it fizzled out for me. By this point, the reader has spent hundreds of pages of sometimes laboured prose in the company of two unpleasant magicians, whose idiosyncrasies, inability to communicate and failure to notice crucial events perform precisely as the plot demands. It may have worked if Clarke had also intended Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell as a pastiche of a comedy of errors, but I doubt that is the case. In a way the ending retroactively justifies these odd lapses of judgement and the fact that the cause of English magic ever came to rest on the shoulders of two men so ill-equipped to bear it, but satisfying it is not.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is an ambitious, at times audacious work. It mixes evident affection for fantasy and the English classics with a critique of both genres, taking its story from what feels like a familiar beginning into an unexpected direction. But at over 900 pages it also feels drawn out, with great lapses where nothing seems to happen and the reader is left waiting for events to unfold. Since it was published in 2004, fantasy has seen much innovation and a proliferation of protagonists from diverse backgrounds, and by comparison Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell can feel dated. It should certainly still appeal to readers with a love of the ‘historic Britain with magic’ subgenre, in particular those who are intimately familiar with the English classics. But beyond that it is somewhat too much like its wizards: learned but long-winded, adroit but unfocused, and ultimately just not in control of its magic.

Notes & Suggestions

• There were times when Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell reminded me of Gormenghast, probably because of the similarities in length, the drifting plot and the constant sense of something ominous in the background. Where Peake uses Gormenghast Castle as the structure that contains his protagonists, Clarke could be said to use the whole of the English landscape. But England is much larger than Gormenghast, and we never spend enough time outside of London to give it the same dominating presence as Peake’s Castle.
• ‘Men failing to communicate’ is also central to the plot of Akira, and I suppose it is generally a common trope. Akira’s sheer energy and much shorter runtime mean it gets away with it in a way that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell does not.
• I enjoyed putting this review in dialogue with a 2008 review of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Elizabeth Hoiem, published in Strange Horizons magazine. Although I eventually tracked down the original, I initially accessed it using the Wayback Machine, which seeks to preserve web content even after the original pages expire. A laudable aim that always values support.

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A long time ago, I had a blog of political polemics. Then life happened and I stopped writing.

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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.

The novel’s imaginative force is buttressed by the exquisite quality of the writing. Fusing form with substance, Peake’s writing is as ornate, meandering and overabundant as Gormenghast itself. His characters are archetypes in the Dickensian mould: hyper-real cyphers for roles that we all recognise (the Professor, the Nursemaid, the Servant), but written with enough depth and pathos to make them come alive as individuals. The narrative meanders like a river delta, with manifold branches that have no bearing on the plot. At one point there is a 60 odd page diversion about a party, which is as brilliant as it is pointless. Gormenghast is a gothic cathedral of words, not meant to be read as a story, but to be experienced aesthetically as the literary equivalent of stained glass and gargoyles.

Gormenghast does of course have a story, or stories, but it is Titus Groan’s coming-of-age and his quest to self-actualise as an individual, free from the oppressive heritage of Castle and Line, that is the thread through the trilogy. Abstracted from the gothic grandeur of its setting, this is a standard narrative: boy grows up, discovers love, does violence against his enemies, wrestles with the strictures of his parents, and sets out to find himself. Titus is not a traditional hero: he is often passive, irresolute or irrational, especially when contrasted to the self-sufficient Muzzlehatch or the ruthlessly calculating Steerpike. This does not much vary the traditional pattern of a coming-of-age narrative, as the universe helpfully makes up for Titus’ deficiencies by ensuring the necessary characters are in the right place at the right time.

This device works within the setting of a Castle, where it creates the sense of Gormenghast acting as a character in the story. It works considerably less well once Titus escapes the Castle at the end of the second book. The third novel is built on the same dream logic as the first two, but without the presence of the Castle as a focal point, both the plot and the story seriously tax the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief. The areas Titus explores are equally isolated from a wider world as Gormenghast is, yet without any obvious reason for this. Characters reportedly move hundreds of miles, yet by cosmic coincidence arrive at the right place at the right time. Unlike Gormenghast, these locations do not function or exist in their own right, they are there simply as canvas for the plot. The same applies to most of the characters in the third book, and in particular the women. The novels clearly show their age here, with the female characters being defined by their relationship to Titus and the function they fulfill as part of his development. And while male characters manage to exhibit a range of virtues and flaws, the women are almost exclusively either vain, insecure, or both. Among these, Titus’ sister Fuschia has the most developed and interesting narrative arc, which makes its premature termination in book two all the more disappointing.

Despite these signs of age, and the narrative sprawl of book three, Gormenghast is a totally absorbing read. The work it requires on the part of the reader to navigate its labyrinthine narratives and linguistic crenelations are what make it a rewarding, if not exactly easy, experience. As the Countess warns Titus before his escape: once you are of the Castle, it will stay with you forever.

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