Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
An alternate-history fantasy in which magic returned to England during the Napoleonic Wars, told as if by a Regency novelist. Clarke's footnotes are as good as the novel itself. The most formally accomplished fantasy debut of the 21st century.
Length is the repeated complaint, one reader calling it a “1000 page kitten-squisher” whose plot fits in a fraction of the count. Pacing gets named for its “glacial pace and meandering nature,” the middle where momentum collapses hardest. The footnotes fans love are the same irritant to detractors, cumbersome and tangent-heavy, and Norrell specifically draws boring-character complaints as the man dragging scenes. A cluster of low ratings call the ending disproportionate, “no plot, no climax,” and one critic judged it a book that “should have been carefully trimmed.” And one reader estimates the functional story is about a third of the actual page count.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
