Jonathan Strange and Mr James

Maybe it’s because it’s the holiday season and my schedule is all out-of-whack. Maybe it’s because we’re trying to get the house ready for company and we're running in a hundred different directions. Or maybe it’s just the snow outside…

Whatever the reason, I’ve stopped reading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, somewhere around page 80 or so (about one-tenth of the book). Maybe I’ll pick it up again at some point. Susanna Clarke did hold my interest for about the first fifty pages. Some really interesting things happened early on, but then Clarke decided to run down too many rabbit trails that just didn’t deliver. She spends too much time on lengthy discourses that obviously:

1 - do nothing to advance the story
2 – do nothing to reveal anything about the characters

Someone might object, “Well, that’s how novels were written back then.”

I don’t think so, because the story I decided to read instead of Jonathan Strange was “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James, which is absolutely captivating. (To put it in perspective, the beginning of Strange takes place in the early 19th century; “The Turn of the Screw” was published near the end of the same century.) Although the James story is long (novella length – about 110 pages in my edition), all of the author’s words either directly advance the plot, illuminate the characters and/or the setting. And while economy of writing may not have been the rage in the 1890’s, “The Turn of the Screw” delivers such a wonderfully creepy story with stunning, unforgettable characters that nothing else matters. The characters in “The Turn of the Screw” are fascinating and the situations James places them in are hard to turn away from. The characters in Jonathan Strange have the potential to be fascinating, but it seems that you have to wade through hundreds of pages of not-so-fascinating episodes (and footnotes) to find this out.

Maybe it’s not fair to judge a novel after only 80 pages. Well, I didn’t say I’d never pick it up again. I’m just not reading it now.

I really think 90% of any story is character. I’ve spent a lot of time lately working on the characters in my new story. I’ve written journal entries from their POVs, I’ve written what a typical day at work is like for them, and I’ve written their bios. All of it is telling me where the characters should go and what they should do. (Actually THEY are telling me.) Invaluable. Hopefully I’ll have this particular story finished before Christmas.

Hey Al, Boris, John S. – thanks for the cards!

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