Happy Valentine’s Day!

This year, DANCE your way to Valentine’s Day! Novels based on fairytales and folktales featuring dance.

In preceding years (you can find all the posts archived on my blog, btw–just look for February!), I have posted novels based on worldwide fairytales and folk tales, and on two “literary” fairytales (Cinderella and Rapunzel). This year, I’m featuring a whole week of novels based on fairytales and folktales involving dance. Here are the posts:

Day One of Fairytale Fantasy Week: Entwined, by Heather Dixon–a novel based on the classic fairytale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” Find the review here.

Day Two: Midnight in Everwood, by M. A. Kuzniar–a novel based on the story behind the classic fairytale ballet, The Nutcracker.

TODAY, Day Three: Valentine’s Day itself! The amazing fantasy novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke–a novel with a strong dancing subplot.

Day Four: House of Salt and Sorrows, by Erin A. Craig–another novel based on “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.”

Day Five: Dark Breaks the Dawn, by Sara B. Larson–a novel based on the fairytale ballet Swan Lake.

Day Six: Sexing the Cherry, by Jeanette Winterson–a final choice based on “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” but be warned–it’s nothing like the others.

Day Seven: A wrap-up and a special exploration of the “dance mania” of the medieval period, plus a free download.

TODAY, a review of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke (published in 2006 by Bloomsbury) is a massive novel set in an alternate-history version of Napoleonic England. It is fascinating, amazing, a work of genius, and a tour-de-force (in that her tone matches perfectly the writers of the day–Jane Austen, et al.). I am daunted thinking about trying to describe it in a single post, but I am focusing on one part of the novel, so that makes my task a bit easier.

The novel describes the relationship between two magicians dedicated to bringing magic back to England, where it has been long neglected. Mr. Norrell, the older established magician, is bent on hewing to exacting traditional standards, while Jonathan Strange, the younger magician, chafes under Norrell’s restrictions. Eventually, their magic plays a major role in the British effort to defeat Napoleon, but it takes a terrible toll on both men.

This novel won both the Locus and Hugo Awards for 2005. Clarke followed its success with Piranesi (2020) another highly lauded novel. It’s much shorter, too. Her struggle with chronic fatigue syndrome has affected her ability to write a sequel to Jonathan Strange. Read more about her life and career here.

The subplot, my focus for the purpose of this blog, involves Strange’s attempt to help his wife, who has been enchanted by “the gentleman with thistledown hair,” a fae who entraps her in Faeryland through a magic mirror and forces her to dance away her life. Fairly early in the novel, the gentleman with the thistledown hair (GWTH) meets Stephen the servant (major character in the novel) and whisks him away to a ball in the GWTH’s country house–more or less his fairy kingdom–called Lost-Hope. There Stephen spots Lady Pole, a noblewoman brought back to life by Mr. Norrell, who manages this by making a bargain with the GWTH. The bargain is that the GWTH will restore half the lady’s life–meaning, Mr. Norrell thinks, that she’ll just die younger than she would have. That seems like a good bargain to him; he wants to impress her influential husband with the power of his magic by assuaging the husband’s grief and bringing his dead lady back to life. Mr. Norrell thinks his service to such a powerful family will help his cause: to make magic respectable again. But with typical faerie trickery, the GWTH creates a very different fate for Lady Pole. She’ll spend the waking half of her life with her husband but the sleeping half with the fae, dancing all night at the Lost-Hope balls. Much later in the novel, Jonathan Strange’s wife, Arabella, befriends Mrs. Pole and becomes enchanted herself, leading to the novel’s conclusion.

Folklore underpinnings of the subplot

Recapping what I mean by “fairytale”: No fairies are necessarily involved. The term has evolved to refer to a particular magical type of folk tale that may involve fairies, princesses, and the like, but may not. (A subgenre of fantasy, involving the fae, is an entirely different matter). And sometimes, what readers have come to know as “fairytales” aren’t any such thing–not folklore, passed down anonymously through the generations and centuries, often by word of mouth, but literary creations by artists hoping to mimic the fairytale aura. I should also mention that my blog posts on this subject won’t refer to anything Disney, except in passing. The Disney take on fairytales occurs in a whole world of its own, it has its faithful fans, and I don’t intrude there.

This post is too brief to go into detail, especially about such a massive book, but fairy lore is full of the enchantments cast through dancing, the folklore basis for this part of Clarke’s novel. If a mortal is enticed to dance in a fairy circle, the fairies typically take possession. Mortals who manage to get away typically find that an experience they thought might be minutes or hours long has lasted centuries instead. Another associated folkloric element of the subplot is the mirror as portal from the world of humans and rationality into the fae world of magic. I hope you see the many similarities with the folkloric elements in fairytales like “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.”

My thoughts on this book:

This novel is superb. It is sprawling, too; the dance elements are just one part of the tremendous whole. The fae lure into a magic realm of dangerous dancing is a major trope and handled masterfully here. I’ll spend my last post in this series discussing a related issue, the “dance plagues” of the Middle Ages, where dancing was seen as a literal ensnarement of the devil. In Clarke’s novel, the fae inhabit a land that is not quite hell, but it’s certainly hell-adjacent, and the dancers inhabit a kind of hell. Clarke is a wonderful writer. Don’t be put off by how long this novel is, if you are the kind of reader who might be. Just dive in for one of the great reading pleasures of our era.

Side note: The novel was made into a BBC mini-series. I’m not the kind of person who thinks the book is always superior to the movie–I like to think, How good is this book AS a book? And then, How good is this movie (or tv series, or whatever) AS a movie? Sometimes the movie is better. In this case, though, the book hands-down wins, because it is just so brilliant. The series is fun to watch, though.