The View from the Cheap Seats (39 page)

I
t has on occasion been a source of puzzlement to me that there are a number of otherwise sensible people, many of them old enough to know better, who maintain, perhaps from some kind of strange cultural snobbery, that William Shakespeare could not have written the plays that bear his name, and that these plays must, obviously, have been written by a member of the British aristocracy, written by some lord or earl, some grandee or other, forced to hide his literary light under a bushel.

And this is chiefly a source of puzzlement to me because the British aristocracy, while it has produced more than its share of hunters, eccentrics, farmers, warriors, diplomats, con men, heroes, robbers, politicians and monsters, has never been noted in any century or era for the production of great writers.

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett (1878–1957) was a hunter, and a warrior, and a chess champion, and a playwright, a teacher and many another thing besides, and he was a member of a family that could trace its lineage back to before the Norman Conquest; he was eighteenth Baron Dunsany, and he is one of the rare exceptions.

Lord Dunsany wrote small tales of imaginary gods and thieves and heroes in distant kingdoms; he wrote tall stories based in the here and now and retold, by Mr. Joseph Jorkens, for whisky in London clubs; he wrote autobiographies; he wrote
fine poems and more than forty plays (at one point, reputedly, he had five plays being staged on Broadway at one time); he wrote novels of a vanished and magical Spain that never was; and he wrote
The King of Elfland's Daughter,
a fine, strange, almost forgotten novel, as too much of Dunsany's unique work is forgotten, and if this book alone were all he had written, it would have been enough.

To begin with, the writing is beautiful. Dunsany wrote his books, we are told, with a quill pen, dipping and scritching and flowing his prose over sheets of paper, and his words sing, like those of a poet who got drunk on the prose of the King James Bible, and who has still not yet become sober. Listen to Dunsany on the wonders of ink:

           
. . . how it can mark a dead man's thoughts for the wonder of later years, and tell of happenings that are gone clean away, and be a voice for us out of the dark of time, and save many a fragile thing from the pounding of heavy ages; or carry to us, over the rolling centuries, even a song from lips long dead on forgotten hills.

For secondly,
The King of Elfland's Daughter
is a book about magic; about the perils of inviting magic into your life; about the magic that can be found in the mundane world, and the distant, fearful, changeless magic of Elfland. It is not a comforting book, neither is it an entirely comfortable one, and one comes away, at the end, unconvinced of the wisdom of the men of Erl, who wished to be ruled by a magic lord.

For thirdly, it has its feet well planted on the ground (my own favorite moments are, I think, the jam-roll that saved the child from going to Elfland, and the troll watching time pass in the pigeon-loft); it assumes that events have consequences, and that dreams and the moon matter (but cannot be trusted or relied upon), and that love, too, is important (but even a Freer
of Christom should realize that the Princess of Elfland is not merely a mermaid who has forsaken the sea).

And finally, for those who feel that they need historical accuracy in their fictions, this novel contains one historically verifiable date. It is in chapter 20. But there are, I suspect, few who will have got that far in the book who will need a date to establish the veracity of the story. It is a true story, as these things go, in every way that matters.

Today, fantasy is, for better or for worse, just another genre, a place in a bookshop to find books that, too often, remind one of far too many other books (and many writers writing today would have less to say had Dunsany not said it first); it is an irony, and not entirely a pleasant one, that what should be, by definition, the most imaginative of all types of literature has become so staid, and, too often, downright unimaginative.
The King of Elfland's Daughter,
on the other hand, is a tale of pure imagination (and
bricks without straw,
as Dunsany himself pointed out,
are more easily made than imagination without memories
). Perhaps this book should come with a warning: it is not a comfortable, reassuring, by-the-numbers fantasy novel, like most of the books with elves and princes and trolls and unicorns in them, on the nearby fantasy shelves: this is the real thing. It's a rich red wine, which may come as a shock if all one has had experience of so far has been cola. So trust the book. Trust the poetry and the strangeness, and the magic of the ink, and drink it slowly.

And, for a little while, perhaps you too shall be ruled, like the men of Erl would have been, by a magic lord.

My introduction to the 1999 edition of Lord Dunsany's
The King of Elfland's Daughter
.

H
ope Mirrlees only wrote one fantasy novel, but it is one of the finest in the English language.

The country of Dorimare (fundamentally English, although with Flemish and Dutch threads in the weave) expelled magic and fancy when it banished hunchbacked libertine Duke Aubrey and his court, two hundred years before our tale starts. The prosperous and illusion-free burghers of the town swear by “toasted cheesecrumbs” as easily as by the “Sun, Moon, Stars and the Golden Apples of the West.” Faerie has become, explicitly, obscenity.

But fairy fruit is still being smuggled over the border from Fairyland. Eating it gives strange visions and can drive people to madness and beyond. The fruit is so illegal that it cannot even be named: smugglers of fruit are punished for smuggling silk, as if the changing of the name will change the thing itself.

The mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist, Nat Chanticleer, is less prosaic than he would have others believe. His life is a fiction he subscribes to, or would like to, of a sensible life like everyone else's—and particularly like the dead that he admires. His world is a shallow thing, though, as he will soon learn: without his knowledge, his young son, Ranulph, has been fed fairy fruit.

Now the fairy world—which is also, as in all the oldest folktales, the world of the dead—begins to claim the town: a puck named Willy Wisp spirits away the lovely young ladies of Miss
Crabapple's Academy for young ladies, over the hills and far away; Chanticleer stumbles upon the fruit smugglers, and his life takes a turn for the worse; Duke Aubrey is sighted; old murders will out; and, in the end, Chanticleer must cross the Elfin Marches to rescue his son.

The book begins as a travelogue or a history, becomes a pastorale, a low comedy, a high comedy, a ghost story and a detective story. The writing is elegant, supple, effective and haunting: the author demands a great deal from her readers, which she repays many times over.

The magic of
Lud-in-the-Mist
is built from English folklore—it is not such a great step from Aubrey to Oberon, after all; Willy Wisp's “Ho-ho-
hoh
” is Robin Goodfellow's, from a song they say Ben Jonson wrote; and it will not come as a surprise to the folklorist that old Portunus says nothing and eats live frogs. The “lily, germander and sops in wine” song is first recorded in the seventeenth century, under the name of “Robin Good-Fellow; or, The Hob-Goblin.”

I have seen editions of
Lud-in-the-
Mist
which proclaim it to be a thinly disguised parable for the class struggle. Had it been written in the 1960s it would, I have no doubt, have been seen as a tale about mind-expansion. But it seems to me that this is, most of all, a book about reconciliation—the balancing and twining of the mundane and the miraculous. We need both, after all.

It is a little golden miracle of a book, adult, in the best sense, and, as the best fantasy should be, far from reassuring.

Originally published in the “Curiosities” section of the
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
July 1999.

T
his is a very poor introduction to
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
(whose name rhymes, by the way, with
quarrel,
or with
sorrel,
the way Susanna Clarke pronounces it), and an equally meager introduction to the person of Susanna Clarke. They both deserve better. Notwithstanding, it is my story, and I shall tell it my way, which is the story of how I became aware of Susanna Clarke and of her book.

When our story begins, I was a scribbling person who made stories and such.

I moved to America from England in 1992, and I missed my friends, so I was exceedingly delighted when the post brought a large envelope from one of them, a Mr. Colin Greenland. Mr. Greenland had been one of the first persons I had encountered a decade earlier, when I had stumbled into the worlds of science fiction and of fantasy: an elfin gentleman with a faintly piratical air, who wrote excellent books. Inside the envelope was a letter, in which Mr. Greenland explained that he had just taught a writing workshop, and that one of the writers at the workshop was a remarkable woman of great talent, and that he wished me to read her work. He enclosed an extract from a short story.

I read it, and wrote back, and demanded more.

This came as some surprise to Susanna Clarke, who had no
idea that Colin had sent me an extract from “The Ladies of Grace Adieu.” Gamely, though, she sent me the rest of the story. I loved everything about it: the plot, the magic, the glorious way Susanna put words together, and was particularly delighted by the information in the cover letter that Susanna was writing a novel set in the world of the tale, and that it would be called
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell—
so delighted that I sent the story to an editor of my acquaintance. He called Susanna and asked to buy her story for an anthology he was editing.

This came, again, as some surprise to Susanna Clarke, once she had established that this was none of it a prank (for after all, it is hard enough to sell short stories in this world, but to sell your first short story when you had not even sent it to an editor borders on the unlikely, and crosses that border).

I was excited by the prospect of meeting Susanna Clarke, and when I did finally meet her it was in the company of Colin Greenland, who had, shortly after their first encounter, persuaded her to entertain his suit (an odd expression, now I come to write it down. I mean that they had become lovers and partners, not that he had removed his clothes and left them with her while she performed small puppet shows for them). From the stories of hers that I had read—Ms. Clarke sent me her short stories when she wrote them, every year or so, with a note telling me she
was
still writing the novel—I was expecting someone of a fey disposition, perhaps slightly out of her own Time, and was pleasantly surprised myself to meet a sharp, smart woman with a ready smile and easy wit, who loved to talk books and authors. I took particular delight in how well she understood high and low culture, and how comfortably she went between them, seeing them (correctly, in my opinion) not as opposites to be reconciled but as different ways of addressing the same ideas.

For the next decade, people would ask me who my favorite authors were, and I would place Susanna Clarke on any lists
I made, explaining that she had written short stories, only a handful but that each was a gem, that she was working on a novel, and that one day everyone would have heard of her. And by
everyone,
I meant only a small number of people, but those who counted. I assumed that the work of Susanna Clarke was a refined taste that would be too unusual and strange for the general public.

In February 2004, to my perplexity and my delight, the mail brought an advance, but finished, copy of
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
. I took my daughters on holiday to the Cayman Islands and, while they romped and swam in the surf, I was hundreds of years and thousands of miles away, in Regency York and in London and on the Continent, experiencing nothing but the purest pleasure, wandering through the words and the things they brought with them, and eventually noticing that the paths and lanes of the story, with its footnotes and its fine phrases, had become a huge road, and it was taking me with it. Seven Hundred and Eighty-Two Pages, and I enjoyed every page and when the book was done I could happily have read seven hundred and eighty-two more. I loved the things she said and the things she did not say. I loved crabbed Norrell and, less feckless than he seems, Strange, and John Uskglass the Raven King, who is not in the title of the book unless he hides behind the ampersand, but who hovers there anyhow. I loved the supporting players, and the footnotes, and the author—she is not, I am convinced, Ms. Clarke, but a character in her own right, writing her book closer to Strange and Norrell's time than our own.

I wrote about the experience of reading the book in my online journal, and I wrote to Susanna's editor telling her that it was to my mind the finest work of English fantasy written in the previous seventy years. (I was thinking that the only thing it could be compared to was Hope Mirrlees's novel
Lud-in-the-Mist
. Sometimes people would ask me about Tolkien, and I would
explain that I did not, and do not, think of
The
Lord of the Rings
as English Fantasy but as High Fantasy.) It was a novel about the reconciliation of the mundane and the miraculous, in which the world of faerie and the world of men are, perhaps, not as divided as they appear, but might simply be different ways of addressing the same thing.

I was right about how good a book it was, and how much people would like it. I was wrong about one thing, and one thing only, in that I had thought that
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
would be a book for the few—that it would touch only a handful of people, and those people deeply, and when they encountered each other they would speak of Arabella, or Stephen Black, or of Childermass or the Gentleman with the Thistle-Down Hair in the way that people talk of old acquaintances, and bonds of friendship would be formed between strangers. I daresay they do, and they are, but there are not a tiny handful of them but an army as big as Wellington's, or bigger. The book became that rare thing, a fine and wonderful book that found its readers, all across the world, and was garlanded and lauded and awarded and acclaimed.

And it is with that thought that this introduction comes to an end.

I am delighted to report, by way of postscript, that Ms. Clarke has remained quite unspoiled by success, and that she is the same sharp, smart woman with the same ready wit whom I met over a decade ago, and though her hair has now turned completely white, it has done so in an elegant and stylish way which means she cuts an imposing figure on the back of book jackets. Colin Greenland, on the other hand, has become significantly less elfin as the years have gone by, but what he has lost in elvishness he has made up for in wizardliness, and now gives the vague impression that he is merely waiting for a team of hobbits to pass by in order to send them upon an adventure,
although the piratical glint in his eye would cause me to think twice about going on such an adventure were I one of those hobbits and not, as I am, a scribbling person.

My introduction to a 2009 edition of Susanna Clarke's novel,
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
.