The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories
Susanna Clarke Bloomsbury, 256pp, £16.99
ISBN 1596912510
In recent years, readers of grown-up fiction - and I do not include Harry Potter in this category - have encountered magic mainly in its incarnation as magic realism, as practised by Márquez, Bulgakov and Rushdie. Susanna Clarke's debut novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, made an exciting change. Not only does the character Mr Norrell succeed in bringing magic back to England, but Clarke succeeded in whisking a very English kind of magic forward from the children's and fantasy sections into the mainstream window displays of every English bookshop.
And Clarke's magic is intensely English: it relies on class-conscious scholar-magicians and silver-haired fairies who mourn the nation's industrialisation: "Tradesmen prosper, sailors, politicians, but not magicians. Our time is past." In Jonathan Strange, Clarke transformed the spells and wizardry into something exciting, grown-up and somehow exceedingly modern. The novel performed that literary trick of being of, but also above, a genre. By combining Victorian largesse with fantasy, Clarke managed not to get stuck in either mode, and she sustained this over a thousand pages.
The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, Clarke's second book, is a work in miniature by comparison. It comprises just eight short tales, all but one previously published, and comes in at little more than 250 pages, even in a large font, and with illustrations and a fictional frame in the form of an introduction by Professor James Sutherland, director of sidhe (fairy) studies at the University of Aberdeen. The stories show why Jonathan Strange does not feel like a first novel: Clarke has been limbering up in print for more than a decade. The tales are set in the magical territory to which she currently has a unique right of way in the mainstream adult market: an England in which a strange door leads you into a fairies' ball, or where Mary, Queen of Scots, tries to assassinate Elizabeth using bewitched embroidery. Strange and Norrell themselves make an appearance in the title story, "The Ladies of Grace Adieu", partly as a foil to the eponymous women who prove that anyone holding the belief that "ladies (as everyone knows) do not study magic" is quite mistaken.
Many of these stories display this feminist bent: the narrator of "On Lickerish Hill", who must guess a fairy's name in the style of Rumpelstiltskin, tells us that her "naturall Genius inclin'd not to sweeping dairies or baking cakes or spinning or anie of the hundred thinges [my mother] wished me to know, but to Latin, Greeke and the study of Antiquities". In Clarke's world, fairies often take sides, rather predictably, with the marginalised, although the spell- casting John Uskglass in the last (and the only previously unpublished) story is trumped by a humble labourer's Christian prayer, "something [the rocks and earth of England] respected even more" than magic.
Set in the same world, Jonathan Strange gave the sense of doors continually opening, revealing new characters, plots, layers and London parlours. Ladies feels stuffy and restrained in comparison. There's no doubt that Clarke can make delicious linguistic use of well-trodden fairy subject matter: "There were horned heads, antlered heads, heads carapaced like insects' heads, heads as puckered and soft as a mouldy orange." But too often she becomes trapped in the narrow corridors of genre, and the collection as a whole feels repetitive and rather twee. Readers expecting another Jonathan Strange (a mighty request, I know) should save their money for Clarke's real second outing.
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