This book, with its embossed cloth cover, is absolutely beautiful. The picture on the left doesn’t even begin to do justice to the object itself. The stories inside are also quite lovely, but they seem to lack depth and substance. I could easily say that they don’t require depth and substance, as they are Brothers-Grimm-style fairy tales, but that would then deny the fact that one of the most interesting pleasures of Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was the fact that she added those qualities to a fairy tale world. Clarke uses many of the same techniques in these stories as she did in her fine, fine novel; the archaic diction, academic paraphernalia of footnotes and bibliographic entries, and the hints at a well-worn mythology are all present, but the shorter form of these stories simply don’t allow them to develop the same impact that they had in her earlier book. They seem like tricks, whereas in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell they did not. Don’t get me wrong, these were lovely stories and well worth reading, but they were lacking when placed next to the novel.
Next up is the first in a series of guilty pleasure books (five, to be precise), David Eddings’ Pawn of Prophecy.
