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Now all of England lay cupped in his black palm
So last night ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and I finished watching the BBC's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2015), of which I believe the first three episodes have aired so far in the U.S. I have thoughts about it. They are all under the cut. Spoilers, obviously, although mostly for the book.
It's a very successful adaptation on the whole. The casting is inspired, the acting almost uniformly excellent, the historical setting plausibly lived-in; it translates entire chunks of the book faithfully without feeling like a paint-by-numbers and most of its inventions or elisions are either innocuous or interesting. Where it runs into trouble, unfortunately, is in the endgame. The seventh episode should have been a seventh and an eighth. The novel's complex denouement is just slightly too much material to fit comfortably inside an hour, even at the breakneck pace at which events hurtle along; as a result, the last episode is where I noticed and cared the most about the divergences from the source material. There are a few that really leapt out at me. In order of recall—
Stephen Black. He's not my favorite character in the novel, because true to form I fastened on Mr Norrell almost at once and Childermass as soon as his more enigmatic qualities came to light, but he runs a very close second and his arc is one of the most interesting and satisfying for me. He was very well cast and I was hopeful about him. After two or three episodes, however, I started to worry. He was being sidelined in his own story; we had much less of an interior sense of him than anxious, good-hearted John Segundus, or even the silenced, furious Lady Pole. I figured there would have to be more of him in the finale, he's so crucial to the rightful outcome of the return of English magic. He's there as much as the plot needs him; otherwise he's completely shortchanged. The scene in which the trees, hills, rivers, birds, and stones of England recognize Stephen as their king and put their power into his hands—and for a moment he is tempted to revenge himself on England, to avenge his mother: "Now. Now. Now"—and the corresponding scene in which he returns to the changed wood of Lost-hope, determined to be a very different and a better king than the gentleman with thistle-down hair, are two of the most powerful moments in the latter part of the book for me. Both are missing from the adaptation. The killing of the gentleman with thistle-down hair is dramatic: it's done with the roots and branches of a great tree instead of millstones and earth; it feels almost like a horrific shout-out to Ariel and the cloven pine, reinforcing the idea that for an instant Stephen is the greatest magician in England. But the nuance of his mastery and the choice he makes with it is gone, and so is his relinquishing of the world of his birth. For God's sake, we should at least have seen him in the silver crown of the Raven King's prophecy. Are there outtakes from this miniseries? I boggle that anyone would knowingly delete those two points from the script.
The Raven King. It's not that he doesn't appear when he needs to; it's that the BBC did such a brilliant job realizing nearly every other character from the novel that I'm confused why they fell down on the most mythologically important one. John Uskglass, the Black King, the King in the North is significantly more imposing in the series than in the novel, and much more conventionally so—taller than Jonathan Strange, archaically dressed all in black, with a pale stern face curtained by his swinging black hair; he does not speak to Childermass on the moor where he rewrites and revives Vinculus and he does not look anything like "a Methodist preacher or a Romantic poet." He looks like the kind of magician-king audiences expect after Peter Jackson's Tolkien. He's nowhere near as uncanny. Rob believes he got the dramatic upgrade because after all the talk of wild magic, sedition in the North, and the nearly apocalyptic anticipation of the Raven King's return, the scene as originally written would have played anticlimactically, but I'm not convinced. One of the reasons I find that chapter so numinous and effective is that when the dread changeling ruler of three kingdoms (one said to be a country on the far side of Hell) finally turns up, scarcely a scene after the terrifying raven-wind that exploded through Norrell's library, he manifests as a "pale, thin, poetical-looking person" who is not remarkable for anything but his detached, ironic air "of great authority" and is even more cavalier with his human servants than the gentleman with thistle-down hair, who at least explains his unasked-for favors before he confers them. The scene as filmed still works, but I do not get the same charge of real strangeness off it. I was sorry; among other things, I had been looking forward to seeing how the series handled his "uncouth" antique accent.
Whether they were made out of plot expediency or different ideas of otherworldliness, I find changes like these all the more frustrating because there are departures from the book I like—in particular, an invented beat in the reconciliation of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.
In the novel, Norrell comes upon Strange in his library at Hurtfew Abbey, much calmer than he expected and complimenting him on the construction of his labyrinth; they discuss comparative spells for a moment before Norrell suddenly bursts out with the closest he's ever going to get to an apology ("I have been your enemy!") and Strange gives him the nearest thing to forgiveness as seems relevant at the time ("One cannot be the conduit through which all English magic flows and still be oneself") and the two of them set about jointly devising a spell to summon the Raven King and free Arabella.
In the series, Norrell is frightened for his life when he discovers a Darkness-ridden Strange rummaging through his library; having been told in so many words by Lascelles that his old pupil has come back from the Continent to revenge himself magically upon his rival, Norrell actually attempts to fight him, i.e., at a distracted moment he throws a candlestick at his head and bolts for the doors. He doesn't get far: Strange conjures fire to bar him and catches him as easily as a child and there is a moment of furious, ineffectual scuffling while Norrell swears that if Strange doesn't get out of his library . . . Strange holds onto him, daring Norrell to do magic that will make him sorry. Flushed and puffing, Norrell screws up his face—it is the most disheveled and the most helpless we have ever seen him—and there is, unexpectedly, a pattering sound. Rain is falling on Jonathan Strange's head. And on Mr Norrell's; he has made it rain in his own library, a small stationary cloudless shower that beads on Jonathan's wild grey-threaded hair as he lets go of Norrell and laughs himself breathless. It is a pathetic display. Jonathan is a numinous magician, Wellington's Merlin who commanded the elements and successfully sent himself mad to work the magic of the Golden Age; Norrell is getting his books wet. And as he sits there on the steps beside wheezing Jonathan with the rain still falling on both of them, he says simply and very quietly, "Do not laugh at me, please. It is cruel to laugh." Without a word of backstory, it's a line that feels like a character telling you everything about themselves: how many times something like this scene played out in his childhood, how much hurt he still carries in his small, stiff figure, ferociously defensive, easily manipulated, insistent on his sovereign knowledge, afraid all the time. And Jonathan stops and apologizes. They begin to talk for real after that. It has no direct counterpart in the novel; it draws immediate, protective sympathy for dry, shy, tragicomic Gilbert Norrell; it isn't an excuse for anything he has done. If they had room for it, dammit, they should have had room for Stephen.
I genuinely don't care that Lascelles dies in this version; his fate in the novel is spookier and more folkloric, but there isn't enough done with the King's Roads in the series to make an encounter with the Champion of the Castle of the Plucked Eye and Heart come out of anywhere but left field. Crazing him like china has its own peculiar aptness, somehow: he can lie, cheat, and double-cross as it pleases him, but there's no real weight to him, a fragile thing that breaks like false politeness and grinds to powder underfoot. Anyway, this macro's hilarious.
I do care that the efforts of Segundus and Honeyfoot to save Lady Pole are complicated by tying them more closely to the timeline of Strange's efforts to free Arabella and the gentleman's insistence on murdering whoever crosses him. Especially since Segundus had perceived the rose at Stephen's mouth as far back as the fourth episode, there is no excuse for him not recognizing the tongue-blocked trivia of Faerie that spills out of the butler's mouth when he tries to explain himself. That was one of the few true idiot moments in the script and it could have been averted entirely. The novel sets up an entirely different situation around the rejoining of Lady Pole with her bartered finger and I fail to see what was wrong with it.
I am still deciding how I feel about raising the stakes with the Darkness. In the series, the gentleman's spell actively prevents Strange and Norrell from returning to their own world unless they find a way to break the curse, because it drains the life from them so long as it is in effect on earthly ground; in Faerie and elsewhere, it surrounds but does not harm them. Technically it results in the same ending, with the two English magicians set to travel from world to world experimenting and exploring as they go, but it makes Jonathan's separation from Arabella less of a choice and more of a necessity; it is a more romantic ending and it lets him off the hook a little. I'm not entirely sure why I'm more comfortable with Norrell getting a moment of obviously intended audience affection than with Strange's self-centeredness being softened, except that romance is so much the default driver for human stories that I kind of value those rare occasions when it's not a character's primary motive, even if it's not exactly a point in their favor. The line that stands out for me on the last page of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is: "They looked at each other for a long moment, and in that moment all was as it used to be—it was as if they had never parted; but she did not offer to go into the Darkness with him and he did not ask her." The characters played by Charlotte Riley and Bertie Carvel would choose differently if it were possible. I am not sure that they should.
Well, that was a thousand words longer than I intended. In conclusion, I have loved Eddie Marsan since discovering him in an accidental double feature of depressing movies in 2008 and I hope his work as Gilbert Norrell nets him a breakaway fandom and at least one award, the first of which Tumblr appears to indicate is happening already. I mean, I just found a gifset dedicated to Norrell's wig. Pages upon pages of Enzo Cilenti's Childermass, I was expecting after the first episode and the internet has not disappointed me. Equal levels of affection for a difficult character and his dreadful Georgian style? I am delighted. Don't say I didn't warn you.
derspatchel and I finished watching the BBC's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2015), of which I believe the first three episodes have aired so far in the U.S. I have thoughts about it. They are all under the cut. Spoilers, obviously, although mostly for the book.It's a very successful adaptation on the whole. The casting is inspired, the acting almost uniformly excellent, the historical setting plausibly lived-in; it translates entire chunks of the book faithfully without feeling like a paint-by-numbers and most of its inventions or elisions are either innocuous or interesting. Where it runs into trouble, unfortunately, is in the endgame. The seventh episode should have been a seventh and an eighth. The novel's complex denouement is just slightly too much material to fit comfortably inside an hour, even at the breakneck pace at which events hurtle along; as a result, the last episode is where I noticed and cared the most about the divergences from the source material. There are a few that really leapt out at me. In order of recall—
Stephen Black. He's not my favorite character in the novel, because true to form I fastened on Mr Norrell almost at once and Childermass as soon as his more enigmatic qualities came to light, but he runs a very close second and his arc is one of the most interesting and satisfying for me. He was very well cast and I was hopeful about him. After two or three episodes, however, I started to worry. He was being sidelined in his own story; we had much less of an interior sense of him than anxious, good-hearted John Segundus, or even the silenced, furious Lady Pole. I figured there would have to be more of him in the finale, he's so crucial to the rightful outcome of the return of English magic. He's there as much as the plot needs him; otherwise he's completely shortchanged. The scene in which the trees, hills, rivers, birds, and stones of England recognize Stephen as their king and put their power into his hands—and for a moment he is tempted to revenge himself on England, to avenge his mother: "Now. Now. Now"—and the corresponding scene in which he returns to the changed wood of Lost-hope, determined to be a very different and a better king than the gentleman with thistle-down hair, are two of the most powerful moments in the latter part of the book for me. Both are missing from the adaptation. The killing of the gentleman with thistle-down hair is dramatic: it's done with the roots and branches of a great tree instead of millstones and earth; it feels almost like a horrific shout-out to Ariel and the cloven pine, reinforcing the idea that for an instant Stephen is the greatest magician in England. But the nuance of his mastery and the choice he makes with it is gone, and so is his relinquishing of the world of his birth. For God's sake, we should at least have seen him in the silver crown of the Raven King's prophecy. Are there outtakes from this miniseries? I boggle that anyone would knowingly delete those two points from the script.
The Raven King. It's not that he doesn't appear when he needs to; it's that the BBC did such a brilliant job realizing nearly every other character from the novel that I'm confused why they fell down on the most mythologically important one. John Uskglass, the Black King, the King in the North is significantly more imposing in the series than in the novel, and much more conventionally so—taller than Jonathan Strange, archaically dressed all in black, with a pale stern face curtained by his swinging black hair; he does not speak to Childermass on the moor where he rewrites and revives Vinculus and he does not look anything like "a Methodist preacher or a Romantic poet." He looks like the kind of magician-king audiences expect after Peter Jackson's Tolkien. He's nowhere near as uncanny. Rob believes he got the dramatic upgrade because after all the talk of wild magic, sedition in the North, and the nearly apocalyptic anticipation of the Raven King's return, the scene as originally written would have played anticlimactically, but I'm not convinced. One of the reasons I find that chapter so numinous and effective is that when the dread changeling ruler of three kingdoms (one said to be a country on the far side of Hell) finally turns up, scarcely a scene after the terrifying raven-wind that exploded through Norrell's library, he manifests as a "pale, thin, poetical-looking person" who is not remarkable for anything but his detached, ironic air "of great authority" and is even more cavalier with his human servants than the gentleman with thistle-down hair, who at least explains his unasked-for favors before he confers them. The scene as filmed still works, but I do not get the same charge of real strangeness off it. I was sorry; among other things, I had been looking forward to seeing how the series handled his "uncouth" antique accent.
Whether they were made out of plot expediency or different ideas of otherworldliness, I find changes like these all the more frustrating because there are departures from the book I like—in particular, an invented beat in the reconciliation of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.
In the novel, Norrell comes upon Strange in his library at Hurtfew Abbey, much calmer than he expected and complimenting him on the construction of his labyrinth; they discuss comparative spells for a moment before Norrell suddenly bursts out with the closest he's ever going to get to an apology ("I have been your enemy!") and Strange gives him the nearest thing to forgiveness as seems relevant at the time ("One cannot be the conduit through which all English magic flows and still be oneself") and the two of them set about jointly devising a spell to summon the Raven King and free Arabella.
In the series, Norrell is frightened for his life when he discovers a Darkness-ridden Strange rummaging through his library; having been told in so many words by Lascelles that his old pupil has come back from the Continent to revenge himself magically upon his rival, Norrell actually attempts to fight him, i.e., at a distracted moment he throws a candlestick at his head and bolts for the doors. He doesn't get far: Strange conjures fire to bar him and catches him as easily as a child and there is a moment of furious, ineffectual scuffling while Norrell swears that if Strange doesn't get out of his library . . . Strange holds onto him, daring Norrell to do magic that will make him sorry. Flushed and puffing, Norrell screws up his face—it is the most disheveled and the most helpless we have ever seen him—and there is, unexpectedly, a pattering sound. Rain is falling on Jonathan Strange's head. And on Mr Norrell's; he has made it rain in his own library, a small stationary cloudless shower that beads on Jonathan's wild grey-threaded hair as he lets go of Norrell and laughs himself breathless. It is a pathetic display. Jonathan is a numinous magician, Wellington's Merlin who commanded the elements and successfully sent himself mad to work the magic of the Golden Age; Norrell is getting his books wet. And as he sits there on the steps beside wheezing Jonathan with the rain still falling on both of them, he says simply and very quietly, "Do not laugh at me, please. It is cruel to laugh." Without a word of backstory, it's a line that feels like a character telling you everything about themselves: how many times something like this scene played out in his childhood, how much hurt he still carries in his small, stiff figure, ferociously defensive, easily manipulated, insistent on his sovereign knowledge, afraid all the time. And Jonathan stops and apologizes. They begin to talk for real after that. It has no direct counterpart in the novel; it draws immediate, protective sympathy for dry, shy, tragicomic Gilbert Norrell; it isn't an excuse for anything he has done. If they had room for it, dammit, they should have had room for Stephen.
I genuinely don't care that Lascelles dies in this version; his fate in the novel is spookier and more folkloric, but there isn't enough done with the King's Roads in the series to make an encounter with the Champion of the Castle of the Plucked Eye and Heart come out of anywhere but left field. Crazing him like china has its own peculiar aptness, somehow: he can lie, cheat, and double-cross as it pleases him, but there's no real weight to him, a fragile thing that breaks like false politeness and grinds to powder underfoot. Anyway, this macro's hilarious.
I do care that the efforts of Segundus and Honeyfoot to save Lady Pole are complicated by tying them more closely to the timeline of Strange's efforts to free Arabella and the gentleman's insistence on murdering whoever crosses him. Especially since Segundus had perceived the rose at Stephen's mouth as far back as the fourth episode, there is no excuse for him not recognizing the tongue-blocked trivia of Faerie that spills out of the butler's mouth when he tries to explain himself. That was one of the few true idiot moments in the script and it could have been averted entirely. The novel sets up an entirely different situation around the rejoining of Lady Pole with her bartered finger and I fail to see what was wrong with it.
I am still deciding how I feel about raising the stakes with the Darkness. In the series, the gentleman's spell actively prevents Strange and Norrell from returning to their own world unless they find a way to break the curse, because it drains the life from them so long as it is in effect on earthly ground; in Faerie and elsewhere, it surrounds but does not harm them. Technically it results in the same ending, with the two English magicians set to travel from world to world experimenting and exploring as they go, but it makes Jonathan's separation from Arabella less of a choice and more of a necessity; it is a more romantic ending and it lets him off the hook a little. I'm not entirely sure why I'm more comfortable with Norrell getting a moment of obviously intended audience affection than with Strange's self-centeredness being softened, except that romance is so much the default driver for human stories that I kind of value those rare occasions when it's not a character's primary motive, even if it's not exactly a point in their favor. The line that stands out for me on the last page of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is: "They looked at each other for a long moment, and in that moment all was as it used to be—it was as if they had never parted; but she did not offer to go into the Darkness with him and he did not ask her." The characters played by Charlotte Riley and Bertie Carvel would choose differently if it were possible. I am not sure that they should.
Well, that was a thousand words longer than I intended. In conclusion, I have loved Eddie Marsan since discovering him in an accidental double feature of depressing movies in 2008 and I hope his work as Gilbert Norrell nets him a breakaway fandom and at least one award, the first of which Tumblr appears to indicate is happening already. I mean, I just found a gifset dedicated to Norrell's wig. Pages upon pages of Enzo Cilenti's Childermass, I was expecting after the first episode and the internet has not disappointed me. Equal levels of affection for a difficult character and his dreadful Georgian style? I am delighted. Don't say I didn't warn you.
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I'm curious: which were the unfamiliar bits? (Does this happen with Clarke's short fiction as well as her novel?)
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Nine
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I don't know if I can sell them articles as a member of staff! (And I don't know if I should have waited until the series was complete outside of the UK even if so.) I almost linked it to Patreon, but it's not directly about film.
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Aughhhhhhhh! HOW CAN THEY HAVE MISSED THAT OUT? **THE** most important moment for Childermass, and an amazing moment overall.
Dang, yo.
(more when I finish reading...)
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The finale really needed more time! All sorts of small moments went by the wayside, but some of them were really important.
(more when I finish reading...)
You totally have the most appropriate icon to discuss this book.
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I may have to do something with that idea.
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*heart catches in throat*
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I was talking about Norrell with
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Yes, I think this is exactly right. I think Marsan captured Norrell very completely and very generously.
I'm not sure I saw him as fully when I read the book. His covetousness and secretive selfishness, combined with his desire for prestige, put me off. But what you say about his having taught himself magic *without* the natural flair that Strange had--that immediately warms me, and I think you're absolutely right that his way of approaching magic is precisely the road for magic to return on--so completely alien to the Faerie sensibilities. And yes: very, very human. That too makes him a good foil for Faerie.
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Very interested in what you say about Stephen--and even after just the two episodes, I can see how the miniseries is likely to move in that direction. (Though in Ep. 2, his interactions with the Gentleman are excellent)
Childermass is one of my favorites as well.
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I'm re-reading Clarke's short stories, actually. I have most of them in various Year's Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies, but I am seriously considering looking for a copy of The Ladies of Grace Adieu (2006). Several stories I remember being indifferent to the first time around have been great on re-read. I remembered enjoying "Mr Simonelli, or the Fairy Widower" as a retelling, but I'd forgotten completely that it's hilarious.
I expect to re-read the novel soon. Incidentally, according to LJ-record, I read it in 2008, not 2006. It took me a while to get around to.
(Though in Ep. 2, his interactions with the Gentleman are excellent)
Yes! Many of his individual scenes are. Ariyon Bakare has great presence as an actor and he's very good when the script gives him enough to work with. He has a powerful, bitter moment with Vinculus in Episode 6 ("The Black Tower") when the street magician repeats his promise of freedom from the gentleman with thistle-down hair and Stephen rounds on him to examine what his English freedom means: "You offer me nothing . . . My skin means that any man may strike me in a public place and never fear the consequence. It means no matter how many books I read, how many languages I master, no matter how diligently I work, I will never be anything but a curiosity. It means that I am nothing." He speaks not heatedly, but precisely and with great pain, and Vinculus hears him. He should have had more scenes like that. Again, it's a problem that could have been solved with more time. I'm sure there are all sorts of budgetary reasons they couldn't get it, but I'm still sorry. Agent Carter had this problem with its first season, too.
Childermass is one of my favorites as well.
Enzo Cilenti is fantastic as Childermass and very well served by the adaptation; it's one of the reasons I'm not talking about him much in this post. Ditto Alice Englert's Lady Pole, who registered even more vividly for me onscreen than on the page. It's probably unfair to the actress that I find myself most impressed by Charlotte Riley not for her work as Arabella, making the character more textured and more active than I remember from the book, but for her few powerfully nonhuman scenes as Arabella's moss-oak double. That kind of thing, I don't think they could have bettered if they'd tried. [edit] And increases my annoyance with the aspects of English magic they did not handle so well, like the Raven King. It's not like they had no feel for the numinous or the unheimlich at all.
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Anyways, I've gone ahead and read spoilers for both the book and the series. And as I read the book spoilers, I kept thinking "Oh, wow, I can't wait to see how this is done in the series"--mostly about everything related to Stephen. It's disappointing to hear that the series is an unfaithful adaptation in so many ways.
I am going to read the book, after I've watched the entire series and read some more about what some other folks have to say about the book. I have learned the hard way that when it comes to longer works of fantasy I appreciate the material better if I read some program notes first.
(Also, I do not Tumbl, but I'm unsurprised to hear that there are many pages devoted to Cilenti's Childermass. Wow.)
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There were seven episodes aired by the BBC: "The Friends of English Magic," "How Is Lady Pole?", "The Education of a Magician," "All the Mirrors of the World," "Arabella," "The Black Tower," and "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell." The sixth is where the slingshot really starts and the last has all the problems I described in my post. They just ran out of time and they shouldn't have.
It's disappointing to hear that the series is an unfaithful adaptation in so many ways.
I suspect it may work just fine, or at least not obstructively, for viewers who have not read the book—it's not that the miniseries forgets completely about Stephen, it's that there should be a lot more of him and his decisions should be given both a different and a greater emphasis. It was just very frustrating to me and I couldn't see any excuse for it beyond the time-crunch issue, which I feel should have been solved in the initial script! At least I don't need to ask for pointers to fix-it fic; in this one case at least, that's what the source material is for.
I am going to read the book, after I've watched the entire series and read some more about what some other folks have to say about the book. I have learned the hard way that when it comes to longer works of fantasy I appreciate the material better if I read some program notes first.
Fair enough. It took me some years to read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell despite having it almost universally recommended to me, but I found it very rewarding. See comments to
(Also, I do not Tumbl, but I'm unsurprised to hear that there are many pages devoted to Cilenti's Childermass. Wow.)
[edit] (I do not have a Tumblr either, but I read several maintained by friends, and so I can see that the fandom for JS&MN appears to be spiking. I make no complaints.)
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I'd be honored. I don't have a Tumblr, but the original Dreamwidth version is here. Thank you for asking!
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Thank you for permission!