In Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, the figure of the departed Faerie king John Uskglass is both self and other; English and UnEnglish; Faerie and Human. He is one of Strange’s enchanted mirrors, about to dissolve into a road: he reflects back not just his own image, but the gaze of all those who look for him still. John Uskglass is the tide Norrell can’t entirely tame; he’s the dark dreaming wood drowning the city of Venice. He’s the harsh, biting blade of Empire, a conquering King. But he was nameless slave first.
He speaks for those in the North who’d welcome a different King, fly a different flag, claim a different country (“Other countries,” Sir Walter sighs at one point “have stories of kings who will return at times of great need. Only in England is it part of the constitution.”). The King in the North is the living cypher of all deep, local knowledge and history that cannot be tamed or killed by Kingship or country: rebellion, language, and memory passed down secretly and sideways through nursery rhyme and sleight of hand. The darkness belongs to John Uskglass, Norrell says, and he fears his magic as much as he longs for it. John Uskglass rode out of England and took the deep magic—the true magic—with him. He abandoned us, Norrell says. And this is why Norrell hates him, why he calls him dangerous—is it not dangerous to give the past so much power? To believe any golden age long-gone and lost? Is it not dangerous to say: It was better then, and not also ask: better for who? Or maybe the danger of the Raven King is not just of a national myth swallowing a nation and a people whole, but the danger of any belief—that it can be taken away.
Uskglass embodies an England that the Norrell of the novel’s early chapters cannot countenance: a wilder place, a place where the great woods have not been cut for lumber, where the rivers still flow unstoppered by mills or bridges, a place where languages and lives have not been lost to the slow bloody churn of making England English. He’s a living history, but not the kind of history that can be shaped into a flattering and unblemished ideal, sculpted to tell a certain story. Uskglass’ is history is like the many threads of Clarke’s novel—it grows wildly in all directions, a garden left to riot, sprouting footnotes and toppling old, crumbling walls. Indeed, Uskglass’ book—the key, Norrell and Strange, believe, to bringing magic back to England—cannot even be read. There’s no one left who speaks his language.
The world used to be a magical place, Norellites argue after their namesake is gone. But by the end of the book, though they cannot say why, magic seems to be seeping back into England anyway. Earlier on, when Childermass glimpses this deeper, wilder magic, he thinks: “The language or spell seemed tantalizingly familiar now. In a moment, he thought, he would grasp it. After all, the world had been speaking these words to him every day of his life – it was just that he had not noticed it before …” and when Stephen hears the Gentleman with Thistledown Hair sing, Clarke writes:
“Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands. In the fairy’s song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.”
The world Clarke’s characters catch glimpses of is no less magic than it ever was. They just do not always know how to name or see it. But that is something that can be learned. Childermass, having found John Uskglass’ book in the form of Vinculus, sets out to be its new Reader, though there is no one to teach him how. He claims to be both a Strangeite and a Norellite; a claim that baffles his fellow magicians. How can you both plunge into the dark and hold it at bay? But perhaps, in Clarke’s world, a man can do and be both. Perhaps a country can be shaped by its history but not noosed by it.
Near the end of the novel, when Norrell and Strange’s spell to summon the Raven King goes awry, Stephen Black, for a moment, holds the power to destroy all of England. Instead, after killing the Gentleman with Thistledown Hair to break his spell, he turns from the country his mother was brought to as a slave and walks away:
“I cast off the name of my captivity,” he said. “It is gone.” He picked up the crown, the sceptre and the orb and began to walk. (…) England lay behind him. He did not regret it. He did not look back. He walked on.”
He takes up the mantle of the King of Lost-Hope, the territory of his now-dead tormenter. As he enters his kingdom, he observes that the rotting bones outside his hall no longer seem horrifying or grotesque. In fact, they soon will decay to nothing. He tells his subjects—the cruel, capricious Faeries he’s spent so many nights trapped alongside—that:
“This house,” he told them at last, “is disordered and dirty. Its inhabitants have idled away their days in pointless pleasures and in celebrations of past cruelties – things that ought not to be remembered, let alone celebrated. I have often observed it and often regretted it. All these faults, I shall in time set right.”
Things that ought not to be remembered, let alone celebrated. Is he speaking of Lost-Hope or of Clarke’s vision of nineteenth century England? In Strange & Norrell, it is impossible to speak of only one. John Uskglass’ Faerie, like the lost King himself, is a mirror. When Lascelles steps off the Faerie road and kills the nameless Champion of the Castle of the Plucked Eye and Heart, he takes the champion’s place, forgetting his own name in turn. Fittingly, the killed Champion was an English soldier, returned from a war he didn’t remember, doomed to go on fighting forever anyway until freed by death. History and violence here are iterative.
So despite the existence of magic (even fading magic) in Clarke’s England, its cruelties are not spelled away. There is still poverty, and slavery, and war. There are still the smaller wounds of prejudice and Empire, the daily grinding down of anyone in its way. And it’s hard to know if Stephen’s departure from the world is triumphant or tragic: there’s no place for him, really, in the world he was born to, beyond that of a servant. In England he would always be an extension of Sir Walter. That he was granted his freedom, that slavery is outlawed in England itself, doesn’t change the fact that he was robbed of his home and his history. A freedom that can be given on one man’s whim is not a boon but a blade dangling over one’s head, waiting to drop. That Stephen has the courage to leave his precarious life in England behind is a kind of heroism. That to live a life of his own requires heroism at all is a crime.
For Norrell and Strange—upper-class, white, and armed with magic—England is often an easier place. But they, too, end the novel by stepping off into their island of darkness and setting the rest of the world adrift.
““Where will you go?” Arabella asks.
“The world – all worlds – will come to us,” Jonathan tells her.”
Now the darkness that Norrell described, John Uskglass’ domain, is not tomb-like or frightening, but familiar. It’s a kind of freedom, too, but not an uncomplicated one. Though Strange gains worlds, he loses one as well, the warm, loving, and mundane world he shared with Arabella in their marriage: “..she did not offer to go into the Darkness with him and he did not ask her,” Clarke writes. Though Arabella is often off-stage, a seemingly minor character when she’s first introduced, she becomes the beating heart of the novel, the hinge its climax swings on. And in the end she’s not subsumed by her love like the prototypical Angel of the Hearth but instead made larger by it, allowed to choose her own life in the light. When Jonathan bids her farewell, he, like Stephen, doesn’t look back, a strange, compelling inversion of the image of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus’ failure has become a byword for doomed, tragic love. In Strange & Norrell, not looking back is a kind of love, too. It's not a denial of the past, but a refusal of the past as pre-determining force, a fitting end for a novel that grapples with what it means to love a person, or a field of study, or a country capable of both great beauty and great evil. Magic, in Clarke’s world, doesn’t refuse the world as it is or deny its history, but it refuses stasis. In her book she’s done what her characters aim to do: she continually makes the world anew.