Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories Book

How rare it is to find a book which is exactly what its author meant it to be. There are no missteps here, everything is deliberate, and much of it masterful. It is not surprising that, when he first read one of Clarke's short stories, Neil Gaiman remarked:

"It was terrifying from my point of view to read this first short story that had so much assurance ... It was like watching someone sit down to play the piano for the first time and she plays a sonata."

The English tradition of Fairy Stories is one of the core inspirations of all fantasy, and yet it seemed that these odd, delightful, sometimes frightening stories were doomed to die out with their greatest practitioners, such as Kipling and Dunsany. Yet I think, in an anthology, Clarke's stories could stand up well against anything they produced.

She is so good at making a whole world out of hints and references. Notice that she never has to get out of character and explain anything to the reader, she is always able to make the dialogue and the situations do the work for her, letting the action of her scenes reveal everything. This not only creates a strong, confident authorial voice, it also means that she is never obliged to break her pacing to 'catch us up', and so the thick, vibrant tone of her stories is never interrupted or betrayed.

Yet for all of the similarity of their setting and theme, each story's tone is very different. Each may have aspects of the other, but overall, it is remarkable how completely she is able to shift tone between stories that could have been very similar, under a less skilled pen.

Some are very funny, others intriguing, and several rather unsettling. The general theme which binds these stories is the use of magic by women, and the place it holds for them. Clarke lamented that, in her grand work, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, she did not have the opportunity to explore the experience of women in her world--at least, not as fully as she could have wished.

She did not want to make the error of betraying her well-researched setting by including female characters who were too thoroughly modern to make sense in that period. It is probably the single most common error amongst writers of historical fiction: that they tend to include protagonists who are inexplicably modern feminists who bear little relationship to the women of the time.

I am glad that Clarke wanted to avoid this, but it is unfortunate that she was not able to find a way, within Norrell, to make a female character who was strong and central but not in an anachronistic way. A woman does not have to be acerbic, mighty, wealthy, or politically powerful in order to be strong, she just needs to have as much personality and self-reliance as the male characters.

But we do get that vision here--and it is an interesting one. Her magic is most definitely magical, as it is not embodied in simple tools and objects, but permeates all parts of reality, thick with idea, contradiction, and unpredictability. Her magic is a living thing, capricious and wonderful.

The illustrations were excellent, with Vess evoking the classic style of the high period of English Fairy Tales more effectively than any other modern artist I have seen. And as with Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, the binding, cover, layout, and font selection were all so carefully chosen to harmonize together that it warms a bibliophile's heart.

The fact that such an interesting, unusual, complex book has become critically and economically successful is actually astounding. It's so rare that things all come together and everyone seems to get it right.

Usually, when I hear the phrase 'feminist rewrite of a fairy tale', I shudder and think of a terrible place that female genre authors go to die, to be read only in compulsory Women's Studies classes. Yet there are a few who are capable of defying convention and actually doing something worthwhile for fairytale women: Angela Carter, and Susanna Clarke.

This is because to them, 'feminism' does not seem to mean making women into men, it does not mean making them masculine, forceful, ruthless, and unemotional. It does not mean making them better. Often, it means showing their flaws, because that is the only way to let the reader understand their personal experience. We are not all equally human in our perfection, but in our foibles.

And for a perfect unveiling of our foibles, few are equal to Susanna Clarke.

My List of Suggested Fantasy Books