Giving up on Mr. Norrell

[prog]

I'm about a quarter of the way through Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but I don't think I can finish it, because I've rather lost faith in the author. When we still have over 500 pages to go through together, that's a serious issue.

I was delighted to find a trade paperback edition for sale for only a few bucks at the Harvard Bookstore last month, and delighted again to discover that the book was SF - I didn't know anything about it other than its sudden fame upon its first printing a few years ago.

Its setting, writing, and narrative voice - a chatty and highly opinionated gentlewoman who makes frequent asides - charmed me quickly, and I sailed through the first hundred pages. But as I read more, I lost the sense that things were hanging together.

Take (and there are some small spoilers here) the case of an interesting character introduced near the start, the head butler in the home of a lesser but important character. He's immediately admirable, so it's all the more gripping when, due to foolish actions on the part of a protagonist, he falls under an enchantment that (if I may simplify things a bit) keeps him from sleeping properly, rendering him dull-witted and unable to manage the house by day. The problem is that this is described over the course of three or four full chapters. First, he succumbs to the spell, and experiences his first unusual night. In the next chapter, we follow him as he suffers groggily through a day, and falls under the spell again at night. New chapter: we see him stumbling around again, and this time he complains to other characters about his terrible nights. Question: why was that middle chapter there at all?

That's not a trust issue yet, that's a where-is-the-editor issue, which is serious enough in a writer's >800-page-long debut novel. The real problem is that this whole subplot of the home falling to shambles due to a poor decision on the protagonist's part tenses the reader for the repercussions that are sure to follow - and as far as I can tell, there aren't any. The entire matter rather vanishes, and at the point of my bookmark, a couple of in-story years have passed with no indications that it had any ramifications at all. Perhaps there's a surprise twist being set up here, along the lines of the character mowing down the whole household and burying them behind the old woodshed without the reader's knowledge. But there's a way to write that without making the reader go "Hey... but what about... what?", and that's not present here.

So, yeah: debut novel, 800+ pages, charmingly written but apparently full of kitchen-sinkery with no editorial direction. If I were a faster reader I'd have more patience with it, perhaps.

Comments

[radtea.livejournal.com]

The pacing is admittedly weird, and I remember having a similar reaction to yours about that point, but then I came back to it and thought, "Ok, it's just not that kind of book. It has its own narrative pace and procedure, and stuff isn't going to actually happen in the usual sense of the word." Stuff does happen, but not at all in the way anyone trained in the narrative conventions of modern fiction would expect. There is even a kind of closure for most of the sub-plots, eventually.

I was never quite able to figure out what the author was doing. For a while I thought she was creating a grand metaphor for industrialization and the decline of magical thinking in post-Enlightenment England, but I was never able to make that idea really hang together.

Still, taken on its own terms, it can be an engaging and rewarding book.

[ianmcin.livejournal.com]

It's hanging by a thread on my nightstand, too. It's a library book, and I've already renewed it once. I guess I'm about a third of the way, but one of the big drawbacks is its sheer size. I'm having a lot of difficulty fitting it into my carry-on luggage.

[xartofnothingx.livejournal.com]

i greatly dislike that book. i finished it but it was a painful experience. honestly the best part of the entire book is the ending. it just takes FOREVER to get there.

[lyricon.livejournal.com]

I thought I'd throw in a comment, since the previous ones (as well as your experience) all seem contrary to my own. I loved the book, and will probably read it more than once. It's been a little while since I read it the first time, so I can no longer comment on the specific part of the book that you're reading... mostly I just remember reading through it extraordinarily quickly and, when not actively reading, wondering about the characters in my head. For me, it was really pitch-perfect and quite lovely.

That being said, the pacing is odd and a lot of the story seems more character- and atmosphere-driven than plot-driven. I suppose it really isn't for everyone at all, but it definitely grabbed my imagination.

Just wanted to throw in a positive note!

[in-parentheses.livejournal.com]

I found it to be a lovely piece (...800+ page brick?) of atmosphere. Plot is not the most important thing here, by any means. I read it in the winter, and I got to feel so very Victorian reading it with my cup of tea while the snow fell outside. But a few years later I remember very little of it, which is unusual for me and usually an indicator of a very flawed book.