Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

English magic died three hundred years ago and is now a subject for gentlemen scholars who study it and do not practise it. Then Mr Norrell, a small, pedantic, jealous recluse in Yorkshire with a library nobody else may enter, proves he can perform it by making the statues of York Cathedral speak.

He moves to London to make magic respectable, to help the government against Napoleon, and to make sure no other magician ever works again. To establish himself he raises a young woman from the dead, and the bargain he makes with the gentleman with the thistledown hair to do it is the wound that runs through the entire novel.

Jonathan Strange becomes his pupil: younger, careless, brave, and a natural, who goes to the Peninsula to move roads and rivers for Wellington. Their falling out is over the Raven King, the medieval magician who ruled northern England for three centuries and whom Norrell has spent his life trying to write out of history.

Clarke tells it in the voice of a nineteenth century novel, with more than two hundred footnotes recounting the history and folklore of English magic, several of which are better than most short stories.

The fairy is the terror of it. The gentleman with the thistledown hair is charming, entirely amoral, convinced of his own generosity, and steals Lady Pole and Stephen Black away every night to dance in a decaying hall, leaving them unable to say a word about it because he has enchanted their speech into nonsense. Nobody believes either of them for six hundred pages.

Stephen, a Black butler in a London house, is the moral centre and the novel knows exactly what it is doing by making the man promised a kingdom the one person nobody in England will listen to.

It is around eight hundred pages, slow, dry and extremely funny, with a comic register borrowed straight from Austen, and the last two hundred pages are frightening.

Best for readers who love Austen and Dickens and want them haunted, and who will happily read footnotes.