I've been reading a delightful collection of stories by Susanna Clarke, and I must say that I only wish the book were longer. It is a sad thing sometimes to complete a book, and this is one of those times. I suppose that I could just continue to read it over and over, but I am not really the sort to do that. However, I am not really the sort to enjoy collections of stories overly much either. There are writers whose works I do return to and read bits over again, and there are a few novels that I have read more than once or twice, but these are exceptions. And it is not so much that I do not care to reread those books, as it is that I am drawn more to the next book waiting in queue.
This collection of short stories is to me as chapters in a prelude to a continuation of Susanna Clarke's previous book, the novel called Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (despite the fact that the title story and all others excepting that last actually were written before or commensurate with said novel), which is a remarkable book that I enjoyed very much. I don't happen to own a copy of it, but often when I am in a bookstore, I search it out and read a passage from it here and there.
Both of these occasions of Susanna Clarke's writing are very engaging and greatly entertaining in various ways for me, but what draws me to them, and what I truly love about them, is there spirit, so deftly and contagiously imbued within her voice - or what you might call her writing style, or indeed, her writing in itself. I make this further qualification because it is not the style of sentence structure in itself that is the point, but rather how it is, or rather that it is imbued with its peculiar spirit. It is infectious, and this contagion manifests itself not only in the form of syntactic mimesis (one which she may have herself experienced from much reading and admiration of Jane Austen) but also, speaking for myself as a (perhaps fellow) enthusiast of things related to English and Celtic magic and the worlds of Faerie, in such a form as stimulates my interest beyond the book and reawakens my senses and my imagination to the magic worlds in a manner idiosyncratic - and not at all a mimicry in this regard, although there may be correspondence (which is far more dynamic as a relationship).
Now, this all being said and true, I do wonder about the last story in this fine book, which I also did enjoy, but I am uncertain about what it is meant to convey, and how it is that such a turn as it represents is introduced within the worldview, so to speak, represented by her legend of the Raven King.
On the one hand, it is a good and amusing story about humility, but on the other hand, there is a suggestion, albeit oblique, that the forces of the Christian God, in the guise of saints behaving much like the members of the Greek or Roman pantheon, are a superceding force to be reckoned with. I find it peculiar, even if not wholly representative of modern day Christian (American) worldview and hegemony, that she should introduce this difference, and to do so contentiously. I hope that she has not done so because she is afraid of retribution or persecution, and I doubt that is the case. It may be a nod to the characterization of the saints in Latin American history and literature (and to a lesser extent in Celtic history) as sorts of magicians (the peoples of Mexico and South America, although conquered by Spanish Christians, retained their pantheon and cosmology by superimposing and translating the extensive Catholic Saint population unto their own. Or she may be up to something else. I shall wait and see. In the novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, there is no such imposition of the Church, but perhaps she is thinking of ways to introduce that into her contrived history of England, magic and magicians, and the fall of the Raven King.
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