Philip Womack

Magic and mischief

issue 14 October 2006

Susanna Clarke taps enchantingly into a vein of folkloric gold. She presents our world as existing in tandem with ‘Faerie’, but without butterfly-winged Victoriana. Instead she creates a sense of danger, as if the Faeries in question are the displaced gods of Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, still retaining elements of frightful power over mankind.

Her debut novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, was hard to miss: it worked, like a charm. A story of the relationship between two master magicians in the early 19th century, it combined wit, vigour and elegance with a cracking good story. Clarke convinced us that magic is part of the world we live in: ‘part of what a man is, just as flight is part of what a bird is’, as the pseudo-scholarly introduction to these short stories says.

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