Reading from my bookshelf

I was reminded about this novel when writing about The Turningglass, so I went back to the shelf and read it again. It certainly stands up to a second perusal. It was a very popular novel at the time but I wondered then, and wondered again how many people who had a copy actually read it. It is exceedingly long, has many footnotes of variable interest and is full of ancient and modern (Georgian that is) magic.

I remember loving Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell at the time. I was ready for it this time and did not read all the footnotes again, I have to admit. The novel is over 720 pages long. I chortled rather at the idea of a magician at the side of the Duke of Wellington in the Iberian Peninsular War and, worse still, at Waterloo. The Duke must be turning in his grave. But as fairy stories go, Susanna Clarke has cooked up a delicious brew.

The London Film Festival has begun again, so for a while this will be more about films that books

Stranger than fiction

This is a very strange book. You can see that my copy has a sticker saying it has been signed by the author, which indicates which cover to open first, but you could equally begin at the other end, the red side and read to the middle. The Turnglass is a tête-bêche. A book designed to be read from one end to middle, and then from the other end to middle – two twin stories but from different angles.

Gareth Rubin has written a Gothic horror at one end, opening in 1881 and an American thriller at the other end set in 1930s California. I read it Black first and then Red, but I think it would work both ways.

Unlike a previous novel with a similar switch, Susanna Clarke‘s novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, in which there were two different copies, a black one and a cream one, and though they were the same story, the perspective switched between the two characters, and one did not usually read them both; The Turnglass is two quite separate novels one intimately and intricately wedded into the other. Not to read both would be unsatisfactory.

The Turnglass is an un-put-downable romp, with nefarious characters and double-dealing, murder and mishap, exactly what you might expect from either genre, ab-sent any ghosts. It is clever and engaging.