Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

In my post of last week on Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, I neglected to mention one feature of the book which greatly appeals to me. Realizing I'd omitted this, my reaction was along these lines: The footnotes! You forgot to mention the footnotes!

I know, I know: including footnotes to comment on a novel's text can be a rather too-clever, show-offy ironic device in the hands of clumsy post-modernist authors. But Susanna Clarke (S&N's author) manages to handle the trick very well. Her footnotes remind me of the ones in Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine, on occasion acquiring status nearly equal to that of the footnoted text. When not merely providing supplementary information, they're often written in the same offhandedly wry style of the text proper; they range in length from brief one-liners like "Duke of Portland, Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury 1807-09" to multi-pagers. (The latter can be a little tricky to handle, as you've got to keep your place in the main text as you read through the footnote, turning pages as you go.)

Here's a representative footnote, concerning a conjuration which Jonathan Strange performed on a couple of churches "in the town of St Jean de Luz in France" (he relocated them):

The churches in St Jean de Luz were something of an embarrassment. There was no reason whatsoever to move them. The fact of the matter was that one Sunday morning Strange was drinking brandy for breakfast at a hotel in St Jean de Luz with three Captains and two lieutenants of the 16th Light Dragoons. He was explaining to these gentlemen the theory behind the magical transportation of various objects. It was an entirely futile undertaking: they would not have understood him very well had they been sober and neither they nor Strange had been entirely sober for two days. By way of an illustration Strange swapped the positions of the two churches with the congregations still inside them. He fully intended to change them round again before the people came out, but shortly afterwards he was called away to a game of billiards and never thought of it again.

As an aside -- a footnote to the footnote, I guess -- this passage also illustrates the matter-of-fact way in which Clarke, or rather her anonymous narrator, describes acts of magic (especially large-scale ones). There's no description, for instance, of the probable havoc wreaked upon the psyches of the worshipers by this stunt. The footnote does not explain the steps or the spells necessary to effect the transfer, and left unanswered are any questions about nitpicky technical matters like how each of the two churches fit the other's "footprint." The magic just is.