*heart catches in throat*

I was talking about Norrell with derspatchel last night; of course, I didn't write any of it down. One of the things I always loved about Gilbert Norrell in the novel is that he is a sympathetic character who is hardly ever admirable. His one unquestioned virtue is his intelligence, book-bound and pedantic as it may be; he taught himself magic out of his library and that's an impressive achievement, especially for someone who does not have the natural, intuitive flair of Jonathan Strange. Otherwise his actions show him to be fussy, petty, selfish, prideful, socially maladept, and afraid on such an unremitting, bone-deep level that it governs nearly every action he takes. He's afraid of the Raven King, of magic he can't control, of not being taken seriously, of being wrong, of being rejected, of being challenged, of other people generally; he can be counted on to make the wrong decision with such clock-setting reliability that Childermass leaves his service with the incontestable parting shot "You have made the wrong choice, sir—as usual!" He behaves very badly to almost every character in the novel and hurts several of them in unforgivable ways. Even after he recognizes the damage he has done and works to amend it, he remains a punctilious and conservative scholar with an uncertain moral compass and no ability to judge other people's feelings at all. (His first suggestion for breaking the enchantments on Jonathan and Arabella is to wait a hundred years for the magically significant anniversary, which Jonathan is very unimpressed by.) He is exactly the magician the Raven King needed him to be in order to restore English magic. It doesn't make him much of a human being. And yet I am very fond of him, and one of the things I love about the BBC miniseries is that it did not feel the need to make him especially nicer in order to be sure the audience would feel for him. (Jonathan Strange seems to have suffered that fate, oddly: he is a much more romantic figure and much more willing to prioritize his wife over his magic than his book-original.) It just had the brains to secure Eddie Marsan to play him, because Marsan is an actor who can be sympathetic and reprehensible at the same time; and then because his Norrell has never been either a total write-off or obviously waiting to be redeemed, he generates an incredible amount of audience goodwill once he finally starts behaving like a person. I was glad to come up with "tragicomic" to describe him. Looked at dispassionately, much of his life is very sad. He is a frequently absurd figure. It is left to the reader to work out what genre that is. If nothing else, it's human.