Over at Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell is hosting a very interesting blog symposium on Susanna Clarke's mega-seller and award winning fantasy novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which includes a very thoughtful and insightful essany by Ms. Clarke herself. It's a great example of how blogging can be a serious academic enterprise.
Based on some posts in which I had discussed JS&MN, Henry had invited me to participate in the symposium, which forced me to reveal my dirty little secret: I never finished it. I found it dreadfully dull and quit a bit over halfway through.
It's not that I don't like fantasy. To the contrary, I dote on fantasy and science fiction. I devour anything by Tolkien, Lovecraft, Heinlein, Harlan Ellison, Gene Wolfe, Connie Willis, George Martin, Steven Brust, Orson Scott Card, John Scalzi, to name but a few.
I was thinking about this post while driving home last night. On the radio, they were playing the Who classic Won't Get Fooled Again. It struck me that what I like about Won't Get Fooled Again is precisely what's missing from JS&MN.
On the surface of WGFA, there's all sorts of fancy filligree: Great guitar and bass solos, brilliant lyrics, and that banshee scream at the end. What makes WGFA really work, however, is that pulsing driving beat that lurks just under the surface relentlessly pulling the song forward. Clarke's gift for language provides all the fancy surface filligree one could ever want, but there's nothing underneath driving the story forward and thereby pulling the reader along.
Science fiction scholar and critic John Clute nicely captured the problem in his review:
The instrument Clarke has constructed to tell her story is extremely subtle, extremely potent and hardly falters, pushing the envelope of Jane Austen's remit with fluent and learned skill. It is a joyful and intoxicating creation; sentence after sentence tickle at the tongue to be uttered aloud; and this, I think, is the problem. Either Clarke, or her agent (the very much missed Giles Gordon, who died earlier this year), or her editors at Bloomsbury, or indeed all of them, seem to have been so caught up in the exhilaration of the language of Strange that they failed to note that almost every scene in the first 300 pages should have been carefully and delicated trimmed; that many of these scenes do almost nothing to advance a story that begs, often unavailingly, to be continued with ....
Contrast Clarke to another master wordsmith: PG Wodehouse. Despite laboring in a field (light humor) almost as subject to critical disdain as fantasy, Wodehouse is widely acknowledged to be one of the great masters of the English language As Joseph Bottum observes, Wodehouse was "a writer with diction that belongs in the class of Shakespeare and very few others in the history of English literature."
Yet, Wodehouse made language serve the plot, not the other way around. As Alexander Cockburn explained in the introduction to The Code of the Woosters, Wodehouse knew that not even his vast "linguistic virtuosity could keep the reader's eyes on the page." Cockburn elaborated:
Study the conclusions of each chapter. Almost always the final line switches the plot, plunging the reader forward into some new portion of the labyrinth. Wodehouse never let his readers relax for a moment. Like Homer, he knew that relaxation meant inattention, sleep, or disconsolate grumblings that bards are not what they used to be in the old days.
In contrast, while Clarke's languid pacing allows her to exercise her admittedly considerable linguistic virtuosity, it invites the reader to relax and then to nod. While Wodehouse knew that "every line has to have entertainment value," Clarke wallows in lines that are utterly superfluous to driving the plot forward. And, ultimately, I tossed the book aside while muttering "that bards are not what they used to be in the old days."
Of course, your mileage may vary. Lots of very smart folks loved JS&MN. Be sure to head over to Crooked Timber to check out some of the best.
