Not to mention appearances later on, in Venice, by Lord Byron.īut not only does this story build magic into history and alongside historical personages, it builds a world in which magic is - or was, centuries before, until Strange and Norell bring it back - part of the known fabric of England itself. It brings magic (and the dramatic rivalry of two of England's greatest magicians) into the real world, placing their magic against real history in this case, the Napoleonic wars, with The Duke of Wellington himself enlisting Jonathan Strange to assist in his campaigns). As it is at holidays, I'd arrived with the fantasy of reading four or five books (as my girlfriend would have), but with the actual result of only getting two thirds of the way through one (albeit 1006 pages). Nothing leaves an insecure bookworm at lower ebb than not even managing to finish one book over Christmas. So sure enough, I ran out of Christmas before I could finish Jonathan Strange. Being a slow reader has often left me feeling like a "fake reader" - like maybe I talk about reading books better than I can actually read them. Even in my own head I read at roughly the pace at which I would read the words aloud - which is good for savouring passages, and for remembering particularly sweet phrases - but not so good for gettin' 'er done. My girlfriend, for instance, reads at approximately five times my speed. Unfortunately, I'm a very slow reader - yet another way in which I'm not the sort of bookworm I envy. So it was over Christmas, in Georgetown, ten years ago - fire crackling, dog asleep on the floor - that I was able to let myself disappear into the fantastically bookish world of Jonathan Strange & Mr. It's really only at Christmas time, or when I'm sick, that I can pretend to be a bookworm of this variety. It felt, in my hand, like a book written purely for the kind of reader I secretly wished I was: the species of bookworm who - far from running round playing shows, meeting hundreds of people while expending vast amounts of social energy in an accelerated, time zone-hopping daze - is most contented and completed when staying home, in a solitudinal pool of armchair light, communing with a book. I don't trust my memory much (more on that in a moment), but that feels accurate. I'm pretty sure I bought my copy at Gatwick airport before leaving England the last time - a consolation purchase after being served my ten-year ban in 2007. It had been out a couple of years I'd heard about it, picked it up thumbed its fresh Bloomsbury pages under my nose. My affair with this book began many Christmases ago.
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