25 May 2005

Getting Familiar with Strange: A Chat with Susanna Clark
by Liz Williams and Claire Weaver

Claire Weaver is co-editor of Matrix Magazine and is currently hard at work on her first novel. She is 25 and lives in London, England.

Susanna Clarke was born in Nottingham in 1959, the eldest daughter of a Methodist Minister. A nomadic childhood was spent in towns in Northern England and Scotland. She was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford, and has worked in various areas of non-fiction publishing, including Gordon Fraser and Quarto. In 1990 she left London and went to Turin to teach English to stressed-out executives of the Fiat motor company. The following year she taught English in Bilbao.

She returned to England in 1992 and spent the rest of that year in County Durham, in a house that looked out over the North Sea. There she began working on her first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, published by Bloomsbury in October 2004.

From 1993 to 2003 Susanna Clarke was an editor at Simon and Schuster's Cambridge office, where she worked on their cookery list. She has published seven short stories and novellas in US anthologies. One, The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse, first appeared in a limited edition, illustrated chapbook from Green Man Press. Another, Mr Simonelli, or The Fairy Widower, was short-listed for a World Fantasy Award in 2001.

Susanna lives in Cambridge with her partner, the novelist and reviewer Colin Greenland.

Liz Williams: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell had a long gestation process. Could you tell us a little about how the book initially started?

SUSANNA: I'd been writing a detective novel for a number of years and it was going terribly. So I abandoned it and gave up writing. But at roughly the same time I got ill with something that made me very tired and I was having to rest up a lot. I re-read Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and when I'd finished it became sort of obvious that I ought to try writing a book about magic, because those were the sorts of books I'd really liked as a child. So I played around with lots of ideas for about six months and finally decided that I wanted to set it in England. Then it became a matter of inserting a chronology of magicians into English history.

Liz Williams: I know that you've written some short fiction. Can you tell us how you started writing?

SUSANNA: I always wanted to write from my teenage years. The first novel I tried to write was set in Liverpool and about two angels. But I never attempted a short story until I'd already begun Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I went on an Arvon course tutored by Colin Greenland and Geoff Ryman. Rather annoyingly they wanted a short story--I wanted them to look at my novel. So I hit on the idea of writing a short story, The Ladies of Grace Adieu, about Strange and Norrell and I gave them that. It's like a little outtake from Strange and Norrell. My other short stories haven't any obvious connection with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but I strongly suspect that several of them join up with Strange and Norrell somewhere.

Liz Williams: What path did your research of the novel take?

SUSANNA: I started writing first which helped me discover what I needed to know. After that I wrote and did research in tandem. The research fell into two categories: there was stuff I obviously needed to know, such as political history, naval and military history, Byron's biography, etc.; and then there were subjects that just caught my eye because they looked interesting but had no obvious connection with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. These were subjects such as the folklore of beekeeping, or Georgian caricatures, and they provided background or fed into the book somewhere.

Liz Williams: Are you particularly influenced by the place in which you write? (whether a country, or a particular town or region)

SUSANNA: One of the subjects of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is the English landscape, particularly Northern English landscapes. I have a very romantic view of landscape--I think that's where some of my idea of English magic comes from--that feeling that you sometimes get looking at a landscape and it seems that the landscape actually means something.

Liz Williams: Who are your favourite characters in fiction?

SUSANNA: Sherlock Holmes and Emma Woodhouse.

Claire Weaver: Your use of language, spelling and prose style feels very unique to a contemporary reader. What inspired you to write the book in this style?

SUSANNA: About two years before I started to write Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell I read Charles Palliser's The Quincunx, which was a big influence on me. That book showed me that it was possible to write a nineteenth-century novel at the end of the twentieth century--which was great because on the whole I liked nineteenth-century novels best.

It seems to me that if you're writing about the past then you want to evoke that time and place as vividly as possible and style is one of the ways you can do this. I love Austen and Dickens and so I tried to incorporate some of their style into the book.

Liz Williams/Claire Weaver: What research did you do into English magic? Did you encounter any difficulties incorporating Christianity and magic, and what feedback have you received on this angle?

SUSANNA: The magic which Strange and Norrell do is largely "literary" magic. Their books and spells are purely imaginary. I did do some research into fairy beliefs, and into fifteenth- and sixteenth-century ideas of spells and magic, some of which crept into the book. In particular I tried to make the fairies as authentic as possible--they live in hollow hills, steal Christians, are fond of dancing. Quite late on I did a little reading on the real eighteenth century occult, but it didn't hook me at all.

It never really occurred to me that there would be a problem with magic and Christianity co-existing. After all, for much of our history magic and Christianity did co-exist, in the sense that there were people who believed in both. So for some of the footnotes I could draw upon the Church's actual attitudes to fairies, witches, spells, etc. Obviously in Strange and Norrell's world, magic has been part of the established order for a long time, so magicians and churchmen have had to find a way to accommodate each other. I don't exactly see them in opposition to each other--magicians and clergymen are both dealing with what's beyond this world. Strange and Norrell would both have considered themselves Christians, like the vast majority of the population in those days.

Most of the feedback in this area is from people who want to know if Norrell's books are real and who've spent time on the Internet trying to look them up. I tell them not to bother.

Claire Weaver: The book incorporates a whole spectrum of emotions: happiness, mirth, achievement, anger, sorrow, and fear. What parts did you get the most enjoyment from writing and why?

SUSANNA: I like writing bits that come easily. These bits are exceedingly rare and impossible to predict or define. Any bit which works well is fun to write (or at least it seems fun once you've written it). And I do quite like writing frightening bits--the only drawback being I have no idea whether or not I've succeeded in making them frightening.

Claire Weaver: How did you originally visualise the characters? Did they change over the years as you wrote the book?

SUSANNA: Strange and Norrell grew slightly more modern--I first thought of them as eighteenth-century--and I think Norrell was originally even more tetchy and cross than he ended up. But on the whole everybody stayed remarkably true to my original idea of them--all except Childermass. I intended him to be a villain and he does seem a bit villainous at the beginning of the book, but he declined to be a villain and went off on his own path completely and kind of became my favourite character.

Claire Weaver: Strange and Norrell appear the foremost magicians of their time, but it's the character of the Raven King that really personifies English magic. What does this term mean to you, and were there any precedents for this character (or indeed for any of the others)?

SUSANNA: The character of the Raven King developed from some of my musings on what it would be like to be able to do magic, particularly if you could do it on a scale that no one else could. You'd be very isolated. It might well seem to you that much of the moral framework which exists to guide people's actions didn't apply to you. People would be very much afraid of you--which would isolate you further. All in all it seems to me that a lot of the mysteriousness that surrounds the figure of the Raven King is the result of circumstances beyond his control.

He was around for so long in Northern England--over 300 years--that at one time or another people would have held every sort of opinion about him--he was good, he was terribly wicked, he was everything in between. It was fun for me to insert little slices of information about him and contradictory opinions into the book.

As for precedents, he always wears black so I think that Neil Gaiman must have been an influence somewhere.

Claire Weaver: Are you a Norrellite or Strangite? Which character do you have most like/have affinity with?

SUSANNA: I'm both. I always meant that both should have good points and their bad. Strange is by far the more attractive character (I hope that's fairly obvious). I made him charming, and witty and mercurial. He's also romantic in the sense that he idealises the past--that's quite like me, I think. And he's very untidy--also like me. But on the whole I'm more like Norrell. He's a very writer-ish person--he stays at home behind closed doors, and he keeps to his study and has to be nagged into taking exercise.

Claire Weaver: What's your opinion on Jonathan Strange being touted as "Harry Potter for adults"? Do you think it's a relevant comparison?

SUSANNA: It's inevitable. Harry Potter is such a phenomenon that any book about magicians is bound to attract comparisons. I certainly don't mind. I've read the Harry Potter books and enjoyed them immensely. I don't see similarities of style or subject, but I do hope that some of the pleasures that readers find in HP--e.g., the pleasure of being carried along by a great story--are there in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

Liz Williams: What are you working on next? Are we going to see Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell again?

SUSANNA: I'm working on a book set in the same world, but it's not a sequel in the strictest sense. The focus will be on new characters. Some old characters will reappear, but I'm keeping quiet for the moment about which ones.