As convincingly 19th-century writing as it is an true account of English magic, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell will delight the lovers of whimsy, historical fiction, and anyone who chafes against the portrayal of fairies as hot boys with abs and a hidden heart of gold. These fair folk will ruin your life and only sometimes do you the dignity of noticing.

Magic never loses its mystique and danger, even as we follow Strange's growth in his abilities, even without invoking fairies and forgotten kings. Clarke lays down general principles as well as the exact methods and ingredients for many an individual spell but refrains from any explanation of how the former lead to the latter so that we, like amateur magicians, never fully understands its innerworkings. This hard-to-the-characters, soft-to-the reader pair perfectly with the impression of scholarship created by endless footnotes and academia to preserve a sense of magic's vastness no matter how many spectacles our heroes and villains pull off.

I use the term 'heroes' loosely. Though Strange makes a superior first impression to Norrell, both titular magicians are selfish in the way that only wealthy men could be in that era. They cause near as much strife as they solve, which is only compounded by the Georgian manners. It often makes for an aggravating reading experience but the self-sabotage grows so organically from their personalities that it couldn't really be any other way. The welcome counterbalance to this is that, while the characters exhibit period-typical misogyny, classism, and racism, the novel does not. Clarke never breaks character to openly denounce it but her narrative spends more time in the point of view of servants and wives than a true 19th-century account of historical events would, and they are often the only ones with the most common sense. Childermass, especially, is perhaps the single most effective actor in the story and Norrell's sequences would be insufferable without him. It can be no accident that while society overlooks them,

the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair and John Uskglass himself seek out Stephen Black, Emma Pole, Arabella Strange, and John Childermass, not Jonathan Strange or Norrell - nor that those four get the most desirable endings

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The only downside of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell being such a faithful representation of Victorian (Georgian, technically? Depending on whether we go by style or setting) literature is that it shares the same drawbacks. I often wanted to grab characters by the scruff and shake until they stopped beating around the bush and being so hung up on propriety. The commitment to detail could also get exhausting. On the whole, however, the frustrations are part of the experience and very much worth it for the delightful, surprising ways Clarke ties off all her plot threads in the end.