Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
Bloomsbury, 800 pp., $27.95

THE CANONICAL LEGEND of Great Britain has long been that of King Arthur and the Round Table--the national epic or "the Matter of Britain," as it has been called since the twelfth century. Popular with poets, the Arthur cycle is firmly ensconced in England's literary culture, the story that explains the nation's origin and nature to itself.

But a second tale, less structured and obdurately common, runs through British culture, often flourishing in what were considered subliterary venues such as children's rhymes yet proving, at least since Tennyson's day, more popular than the Knights of the Round Table. Stories of English life touched by the world of fairies--capricious, inconsistent in their attitude toward humankind, finally unknowable--have held audiences at least since the late Medieval era, when the word "fairy" (from the French faerie, "enchantment," and evidently introduced after the Norman Conquest), with its suggestions of refinement, displaced the stolid Anglo-Saxon word "elf." The idea of fairies forming a hidden supernatural aristocracy certainly predates Spenser and Shakespeare, and seems to distinguish the English tales of wee folk from those of Scotland and Ireland. Perennially popular while tales of King Arthur often falter (another big-budget film failed this summer), they might be called the Matter of England.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke's very long first novel, has been described by its publishers as "Harry Potter for grownups." However seriously Bloomsbury Press may take this ambition (and they have been prudent enough not to mention it in their dustjacket copy), the comparison is misleading. The appeal of J.K. Rowling's novels involves (among other things) the pleasures of school adventures, the ironic juxtaposition of a magical world with the mundane contemporary one, and the pathos of the young orphan, none of which Clarke's book shares.

Clarke's England of 1806 is the one we know, war-weary and unmagical, but this England has a slightly different provenance, for magic is understood to have once existed, a major force in British history that disappeared centuries earlier. A society of "theoretical magicians" (meaning historians of magic) in York learns of a reclusive gentleman who claims actually to practice magic. When they express to him their doubts, he maneuvers them into agreeing to forgo all claims of being magicians if he successfully demonstrates his powers, which he then does spectacularly. He is Mr. Norrell, retiring and fretful, but so intent upon remaining England's sole magician.

CLARKE'S TALE of Mr. Norrell's rise to eminence, his eventual confrontation by Jonathan Strange--young, self-educated (Norrell has spent decades buying up all surviving old books of magic), bold where Norrell is tremulous--and their eventual uneasy rapprochement is recounted over nearly eight-hundred pages, in a narrative voice that is stately, assured, and pleasantly matter-of-fact. "Be that as it may," she writes, "Mr. Norell (a less fanciful person than I) was satisfied with his new house, or at least as satisfied as any gentleman could be who for more than thirty years has lived in a large country-house surrounded by a park of mature timber, which is in its turn surrounded by a good estate of farms and woods--a gentleman, in other words, whose eye has never been offended by the sight of any other man's property whenever he looked out of the window."