August's recommendation: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke.
I'm not sure I've ever read a more English book. They're probably out there, but I ignored them because they were Literature of the sort that bored me stiff. This book did not bore me stiff, as you probably suspected when you saw me recommending it.
Early nineteenth-century England, with a twist: magic exists. Or rather, it used to. And it still does exist -- as a scholarly field, meaning that upper-class gentlemen meet in their societies and clubs to argue over obscure points of magical history and, when questioned as to why no one actually does magic anymore, come up with responses like "You would not, I imagine, suggest that it is the task of botanists to devise more flowers? Or that astronomers should labour to rearrange the stars?" They study magic; they don't do it. What an absurd suggestion.
Yet magic was once done, in the documented historical past -- and what a past it is. It is the past of John Uskglass, the Raven King, stolen away as a child to a Faerie court and returned years later to rule over northern England for three hundred years before vanishing. We learn, rather late in the book, that although everyone speaks of England as a kingdom, its situation is much odder than that: the "king" of England is the king of southern England, and is just sort of holding the north in trust for its true king. It is the past of the Golden Age or Aureate magicians, whose great deeds (in cooperation with their fairy servants) are for the most part only documented second-hand, and of the Silver Age or Argentine magicians, who did the documenting, and whose magic was a sad shadow of their glorious predecessors. And then even the Silver Age passed away, and magic retired to the status of a subject fit for gentlemen to study and argue over, a profession fit for street charlatans, and little more.
Then along comes Mr. Norrell.
If you start reading this book and discover you don't like Norrell very much, hang in there; Jonathan Strange appears on the scene eventually, and is far more congenial. But give old Norrell credit: when everybody's convinced that nobody does magic anymore (not real magic), he comes wandering up and, in his usual disagreeable way, does some. Strange may be more pleasant, but Norrell did it first. And between the two of them, they set out to restore magic to its proper status in England, each in their own way -- Norrell by publishing boring articles and discrediting every past and current magician he doesn't like (which is most of them), Strange by wandering off to the Continent to help out the Duke of Wellington and more or less making up spells as he goes (and rearranging a great deal of Spanish geography in the process).
This book is, as I said, very English. Very nineteenth-century English, at that. People shew each other things, or chuse things, or surprize each other, or cut things with scissars. Englishness has sunk into every pore of this book, starting with the spelling and moving all the way up to behavior and history. I also, perhaps unfairly, attribute the rather rambling nature of the story to its Englishness; a writer (or editor, or reader) of the "cut out everything that's not absolutely necessary" school would probably find this thing could be trimmed down to half of its 782-page length. Me, I like it the way it is. The pleasure isn't just in the plot; it's in all the loving detail and amusing touches (and never fear, there is humour in it, albeit dry nineteenth-century English humour).
Speaking of plot, that's the one place were I maybe have a complaint (aside from not liking Norrell all that much) -- the book wanders around for a while, telling a story but not necessarily going anywhere particularly big, and then suddenly it promises you something really big, and when all's said and done . . . I guess the big thing has happened, but not quite on the epic scale that it briefly seemed to be building toward. I, erm, can't make that any clearer without spoilers, but you get the idea, I hope. I won't go so far as to say the ending's bad; it's not. Maybe it's just English. Yes, I suppose that could account for it. <g>
So, gentle readers, there you are: the 847th review of this novel to have appeared since it was published the other week. There's been a lot of fanfare and a lot of hoopla, and apparently it's been optioned for a movie (how the hell do you make a movie of this monstrosity?), but I'm pleased to say that, for once, the hype has not been overblown. I liked this book lots, all 782 pages of it.
Except page 422 -- that one wasn't so good.
(Just kidding.)