I had rather an odd image come to mind that was of warriors with swords hacking down in what I can only describe as “in an industrial rhythm”. Two groups of men lining up and striking something (unseen) in between with every second man moving in synch (and hence half a turn out of sync with the people on each side of them) – giving a piston-like precision to the strokes.

In fairness I can claim no originality as Andrew Collins had previously been vocal about the possibility of these sites as a focus for death cults or funerary rites so the suggestion had already been planted. Still the image was a striking one and it lasted with me long after the weekend had ended.

[Click on the "Read More" link below to continue.] What had really wound Andrew up was the suggestion (most recently in a BBC Timewatch documentary) that Stonehenge (in this particular instance but the implication extended to other, similar sites) had been “a Neolithic Lourdes”, that’s to say a place of healing. Andrew was strongly of the opinion that the opposite was the case and that the focus was around death and not healing. He laid out his thoughts in a comprehensive rebuttal on his website here.

For my birthday this year (after some not so subtle hinting) I was given a copy of a DVD called “Standing with Stones” which I had seen reviewed by Greg at The Daily Grail. For the usual odd reasons, though, I hadn’t got around to watching it, so when I came back from Avebury, buzzed up with all the stone activity, I excavated it and played it through in a single sitting.

Firstly, I have to stress that this is a marvellous piece of film if you have even a passing interest in megalithic sites. It’s shot beautifully throughout by Michael Bott and the presenter, Rupert Soskin, is a thoroughly engaging guide whom you are delighted to have whisk you around the key megalithic sites in the British Isles. His enthusiasm for the subject shines through and he has clearly studied the sites closely and is consequently able to highlight some fascinating angles that other commentators appear to have overlooked.

At a certain point in the DVD they briefly mention Avebury and have a fantastic CGI reconstruction of the (what were then) 30ft high banks with a slight platform running around the middle. They suggest that this may have been a primitive seating area for spectators to watch what was going on inside the circle. Immediately this rang true to me because one of the first thing that you’ll see anyone who visits the site doing is climb up on the bank and look back down inside the circles. In addition, it would back up Andrew’s idea of there being more of the death cult than the healing about the place.

I decided to write to Michael and Rupert to ask them about this idea of Avebury as primitive colosseum but before I could, I saw that some other academics had weighed into the Stonehenge-as-Neolithic-Lourdes debate. This article appeared only last week in The Telegraph and came down firmly againt the healing centre idea.

When I did get a chance to email the guys at Standing with Stones I received prompt, helpful and thoughtful responses from both Mike and Rupert for which I am most grateful. Mike also sent me the wonderful still from the CGI reconstruction of Avebury which you can see above (click on the thumbnail to see a bigger image but please do not reproduce without permission).

Both of them also referred me to a book by Mike Pitts (the same academic cited in the Telegraph article above) called Hengeworld where there is a brief mention of the theory of henges as arenas. One of the key passages (describing Durrington Walls) goes as follows:

“At the South Circles at the Walls, the quantities of animal bones are so great as to suggest pork feasting on a grand scale. ‘Feasting’ is a contentious word: perhaps there were just a lot of people living inside this superhenge, and over time their rubbish accumulated to give a false impression of large-scale butchery. But it is not just the NUMBERS of meat bones that are striking.

Julian Thomas had a detailed look at the remains, and confirmed the original analysis. Many unfused epipheses (the articulating ends of bones in young animals) were still in place, meaning these bones had to have been buried with the tissue still attached. The absence of dog gnawing indicated this was done pretty quickly. Yet there was little evidence for butchery in the form of flint scrape marks, and many bones had not been split for their marrow. The suggestion was that there was so much meat about that a lot remained unconsumed, and flesh still adhered to bones when they were carefully and immediately buried. Further study has revealed the curious fact that some of these pigs (over 95%), domestic – not wild, were apparently killed by archery. The tips of some of the arrowheads are embedded in pig bones. Pigs do not like to die, and make this fact pretty obvious. There must have been some spectacularly noisy and messy occasions in the vicinity of these large timber rings.”

Rupert also pointed me towards Grahame Clarke as being one of the the first (in the 1940s) to air the theory that the banks were for spectators. Rupert himself has a book coming out in the Spring (also called “Standing With Stones”) which will elaborate on this idea so keep your eyes on their website for more information.

All in all an intriguing combination of events, hinging on the henges. Well done to Andrew for once again not being afraid to challenge the hype and many thanks to Mike and Rupert for their kind assistance. Look forward to seeing the book and the next film, Guys.

(Click “Read More…” below to see the full review) Whereas most of us might take our goals and write them in a special book that we kept locked in a drawer somewhere or, if we were particularly diligent, create a vision board to hang discreetly somewhere out of the common view, Louise Langley has used “The Sacred Quest” as her “vision board”. It starts with a description of what has actually happened and ends with a description of what the author hopes will happen but which hasn’t yet but which is related in the book as if it has happened (if you follow me). This can sometimes challenge the sympathy of the reader as certain aspirational statements seeming outrageously arrogant when they are presented in a completely po-faced manner. Whatever your reaction to such claims, though, you cannot fail to be impressed by her audacity and her honesty.

Sylvia Beamon piqued my interest in Royston Cave with an excellently well-balanced and yet still intriguing article about the Cave and its Templar history.

However, it is the section after these essays that makes this book so useful (and so appropriate for this psychic questing website). For what Brighton does next is to take 42 Templar sites around Britain and focus on each one in turn. He provides background historical information and then highlights the items most of interest at each site. He supplements the excellent text with his own equally high quality photographs (for example the photograph of the painted head at Templecombe is that clearest I’ve seen anywhere).

If I had a single criticism it would be that the amount of information on each site is quite limited being no more than a taster really. I appreciate that, as he’s covering 42 sites in what is essentially an introductionary guide, this is a necessary limitation but having read each entry I yearned for more information. Maybe in the future, there might be a case for an expanded “expert level” tome.

I’ve only been to 2 of the 42 sites listed (Shipley and the Temple Church, London) but, being able to see other nearby sites at a glance, I certainly now intend to visit some more and I’ll definitely be taking this book with me.

That aside I was thoroughly engrossed by this book and I had a piece of paper beside me which I used to take notes of nuggets of information that I thought deserved follow-up. By the end of the book the page was full which is fair testament to its thought-provoking nature.

As with all such collections the overall experience is like tackling a box of assorted chocolates (although as you’re all probably just getting over your Easter inchoxification, this is probably a nausea-inducing simile) – the ones you like you want more of, but there are invariably some that aren’t to your taste either. Thankfully in this collection there were far more of the former.

I have to say (and not just because he is a “magus” on this site) that Yuri’s articles were probably my favourite. It’s been a hobby horse of mine for a while that there seems to be two perspectives of early Christianity – the story told by the community themselves and the story told by external sources (e.g. Josephus) – and that some characters may be appearing in both under different guises.

In particular it seems to me that Jesus and his family may have had closer ties to the existing priestly power structure than the Gospels let on (although tantalising glimpses of the possible links do exist). If only you could triangulate the characters from both traditions and see if a more comprehensive composite picture emerges. Yuri cuts to the heart of this with his essays on Salome and John the Baptist and I for one would love to see what additional flesh could be added to these particular bones (coporal metaphors intended!).

Lynn Picknett’s offering is as finely crafted as ever although if you’ve read her Templar Revelation/Mary Magdalene books there’s little here that’s new. Robert Lomas’ contribution is similarly deft although in his case I was less interested in the subject (Freemasonry). I had one of those spooky moments when I saw that one of the contributors was Barry Dunford who I referenced in the Quest Lead forums. I had no idea that this was the case (Yuri, you never said that he was a collaborator of yours). His article seemed at first glance quite niche but left me with the feeling that it contained exactly the kind of specific, local landscape information that might actually spring into relevance during a psychic quest proper.

All in all then an intriguing read and if you have any interest in Templars, early Christianity, the Holy Grail or Freemasonry then I would recommend it as a sort of mental flint.

It is here, with great shame, that I have to confess that I do not practice what I’ve just preached. My own journaling is entirely sporadic and my writing schedule almost as non-existent as my discipline. Despite this I have still managed to accumulate battered folders full of ideas for stories, correspondence, notes for research and fragments of dreams. None of it is properly catalogued or even filed.

One of my New Year’s resolutions therefore was to start doing some consistent journal writing. Although probably just an excuse to put off actually doing any writing, I decided that if I was going to start serious journaling I would investigate and acquire some proper software with which to do it. Taking my procrastination to an extreme, I then decided to code the journal software myself. To explain why and to suggest two alternatives, I offer the following review of journal software.

Omea + Journal Plug-in

I first came across Omea (written by JetBrains) when I was searching for a good RSS reader. In fact Omea (a contraction of “omnia mea”, all my things) is rather more than that. Aiming to live up to its name it attempts to collate in a single application all the things that you might need from a software application. To this end the free – that’s totally, no catches, free – Omea Reader allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds and newsgroups and to bookmark webpages. All the resulting items of information are indexed (in a very similar fashion to Google desktop for those of you who are familiar with that) and stored within Omea where they can be categorised and retrieved using some standard but powerful techniques. The $49 Omea Pro additionally sucks your emails and Outlook tasks into itself and subjects these to the same useful organisation.

So, for example, searching for the word “alchemist” across all the rss articles, newsgroup items and bookmarked web pages is achieved immediately and easily from a single point. Similarly if I was doing some research on, say, Quantum Physics, as I came across useful webpages, rss articles or newsgroup discussions, I could categorise them and then later when I came to write the article I could view together all the items which had the “Quantum Physics” category attached.

However, one striking omission was the lack of a free-form notes entry resource. As I use Omea anyway for my rss and newsgroup subscriptions, I decided to have a crack at writing a plug-in that gave the notes/journal entry facility. The benefit I saw of holding notes within the Omea environment was that you don’t have lots of half-page Word documents lying around in different directories on your computer. And I know that I’m flogging this one to death but the beauty of the Omea environment means that you can quickly leverage off existing features like text indexing and categorisation to give you some very powerful organisational ability for all your ideas, notes, dreams or whatever.

Anyway the plug-in has been developed and is downloadable from this website (use the Downloads link from the main menu) but you first need to download and install Omea itself (latest version of the free Omea Reader here: http://www.jetbrains.com/omea/download/reader.html ).

One other resource that Omea tracks which I haven’t mentioned so far is Contacts. One of the nice touches of Omea (and my plug-in) is that you can link contacts to resources and thus later retrieve them by the same way. So if I am using the plug-in to records dreams, I can specify who appeared in the dream and later search for all dreams that a particular person appeared in.

The downsides to this approach (my plug-in that is, I hasten to add, not Omea itself) are that (1) the functionality is still fairly limited and (2) there is not yet a backup/export routine for notes added, and (3) it was never designed specifically for journal writing.

Clearly I’m biased to start with (otherwise I wouldn’t have invested the time and effort to develop a plug-in), but I find the Omea environment is inviting and a pleasure to use (the same developers also produce some code development tools and their expertise with designing interfaces is obvious) and once someone writes a mind-map plug-in, it really will be a single repository for me that contains “all my things”.

LifeJournal

LifeJournal, costing $39.95, by Chronicles Software is the grandmother of journal writing software. It’s a mature, highly stable offering which focuses totally on journal writing. The first thing that impressed me about LifeJournal was not the software itself but the community/support for writers that has grown up around it. I first came across the software many years ago and, as a result of downloading the demo version of the software, have been receiving their newsletters ever since. These are usually excellent, containing great tips for journal writers and even if you don’t use the software I would strongly recommend doing the same and subscribing to the newsletter.

While the software is friendly, easy to use and effective, the interface is definitely beginning to tire and the functionality hasn’t grown much beyond the basics of adding rich text notes and a mood graph. Thus there is no rss facility (or newsgroups or webpages – although web links can be embedded in the notes) and this makes it less useful for the information-gathering/article preparation side of things.

For the dedicated journal writer, though, it is superb with inspirational quotes, block-busting prompts and the aforementioned “writers community” wrapping it all.

XML Journal System

Although I did a search on Google for “journal software”, I actually came across this whilst searching for code components to include in my own plug-in. If I was Matt Sturm, the author of XML Journal System ($24.95 from Sturm Studios), the second thing I would do would be to re-jig my website and make it rank better on the search engines (the first thing I would do would be to change the name of the software).

Like Omea (and unlike LifeJournal) the whole feel of this software reflects its very modern coding architecture. However, even more so then Omea, XJS (as it’s known) leverages this architecture to provide an amazing amount of functionality in the form of plug-ins that come with the basic software.

First things first. XJS is more like LifeJournal in that it is a dedicated journal writing piece of software. Again like LifeJournal it includes a “mood meter” and like all the packages reviewed it has word searching and hierarchical categorisation as standard. However it also includes: scan-to-journal, voice, video, word processing, diagramming, and handwritting support straight out of the box.

Three more features that are extremely valuable are: the ability to synchronise with a Pocket PC PDA (or multiple other PCs), the ability to push entries directly out to a blog, and the ability to create a “super”-entry (a “story”) with multiple entries linked underneath it.

Oh, did I mention XJS has a built-in Personal Information Manager? Whew!

So apart from the instantly forgettable name and the stealth marketing strategy are there any downsides to the seemingly unstoppable XJS. Well, yes. There are.

Firstly, as I’ve mentioned, it is designed primarily as a journal writer so the interface is not geared up for multiple sources of information like Omea’s. Also, although it contains an RSS plug-in, it doesn’t (that I can find – please correct me if anyone knows different) support newsgroups or web page bookmarks. Even the RSS plug-in works in an odd way. Instead of automatically downloading articles from your selected feeds, you have to jump into the feeds and then add the articles which interest you to your journal entry. Thus the journal entry acts as a container into which you can put all the other types of information. Weirdly although you can create contacts (as part of the Personal Information Manager) you don’t appear to be able to link the contacts to the journal entries.

But even allowing for the fact that this is software for journal entries rather than “everything”, there is something terribly wrong with the ergonomics of the interface. In fact the whole feel of the program is fairly austere but I’d forgive it that if they sorted out the weird quirks of navigation. When I first started playing with this software I kept thinking that I was hitting bugs as I found I couldn’t do what I wanted – then it would turn out that in fact I just wasn’t navigating the software correctly. Now, as it’s my business, I’d like to think I know something about working my way around software applications but this had me stumped several times and I’d be amazed if a more non-technical user wasn’t completely bewildered (Test: try attaching a new Mood called “psychically hoppin’” to a journal entry).

Here’s some more examples: the attachments and stories functions are held under the “Tools” menu on the very top of the window, XJS on the Go is accessed from the “File” menu in the same place while some of the other plug-in functions are held on a secondary toolbar underneath the above menu options, and still more of them are held behind a mode button on a tertiary toolbar and the Mood function sits by itself, again hidden behind a button labelled “Extensions” on the same tertiary toolbar. Oh and the PIM and feedreader are launched from tiny icons on the bottom-left of the screen in what seems to be yet another toolbar. Confused? I was.

The only other minor bother that I’d have is that I appeared to hit a few genuine bugs (although it’s hard to tell) which makes me fret that maybe with all the functionality that’s been crammed in there, the quality control might not be up to scratch.

However, if Matt sorted out the interface and the stability, this would be one truly awesome piece of journal writing software and I’ll be keeping an eye on his site to see how it progresses.

Furthermore, manuscripts were fragile objects, prone to destruction by fire or flood, or by the depredations of mice or men. Even before the end of the Middle Ages, library catalogues recorded decayed manuscripts in a script no one could read, and at the Reformation and in the French Revolution monastic libraries were destroyed wholesale. In England, John Aubrey, the seventeenth-century antiquary, lamented the loss of the manuscripts of Malmesbury Abbey, near his home: ‘in my grandfather’s days, the manuscripts flew about like butterflies’. They were used to stop the rector’s beer barrels, to cover books or to wrap the gloves which were the town’s speciality. So there is always the lurking question in any discussion of medieval literature of what has been lost. This is aggravated and complicated by the extreme respect for tradition in the Middle Ages: originality was suspect and writers therefore often claimed to be working from an earlier text which was actually a figment of their imagination, as much an invention as the tale they had to tell. Perhaps, in the end, we have not lost very much.”

Then he goes on to trace the evolution of the literary Grail histories starting with Chretien de Troyes. He quotes at length from the original texts giving the reader an excellent feel for the style of each variant of the story and he examines the arguments for and against their place in overall chronology of Grail romances.

In section 2 Barber highlights various themes that are central to the Grail legend and sees what the early Grail stories actually tell us about the topic. Thus we see what descriptions of the Grail the writers actually wrote; what connections the Holy Grail might have had with the Eucharist (or, conversely, heresy); when the idea of the Wounded Land got introduced; and what secrets the Grail might have concealed.

Section 3 then looks at how the concept of the Grail has changed over the centuries, mostly by viewing how it is portrayed in the popular culture of the day. This section takes us right into the present with critiques of, amongst many others, Graham Phillips’ “The Search for the Grail”, Umberto Eco’s masterful “Foucault’s Pendulum” and, of course, “Monthy Python and the Holy Grail.” All of this is good sensible stuff but it does need the lunatic fringe cited in the last section to keep the book from becoming over-serious and dull.

The overall tone of the book is very reserved and sane, the analysis focussing exclusively on the physical evidence as it exists and avoiding all flights of fancy and conjecture. Paradoxically, for Barber, the Holy Grail is ultimately a triumph of Chretien de Troyes’ literary imagination. Any work which declares itself to be merely fiction thus gets a positive treatment by Barber, while, for the most part, he pours scorn on anybody attempting an “historical” analysis of the Grail. Essentially he seems to believe that the idea of the Grail leaped fully formed out of de Troyes imagination and that any attempts to trace the Grail before this time is doomed. If there is any single “key” to the Grail then Barber thinks it is simply a secular myth around the sacrament of the Eucharist in Catholic mass.

Although he talks about the advocates of the belief that the Grail stories (and Arthurian literature as a whole) was inspired by earlier Celtic legends, Barber never seriously examines the legends themselves only devoting a few brief paragraphs to them. I feel that this is a major opportunity missed for if he is arguing that there was no Grail before de Troyes, surely he must closely examine the possible Grail prototypes in other cultures. Part of the problem I suspect is the lack of a written tradition within the Celtic culture for, as I’ve already mentioned, Barber’s approach (which works well for the most part) is to stick steadfastly to historical documents. However, there is much in the oral tradition of Celtic mythology that has been scrupulously documented and which is surely equally admissible as evidence. As just one example, in both Robert de Boron’s and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s versions, the Grail is linked to angels who sided with neither Lucifer nor God in the Angel’s Rebellion and their punishment for staying neutral was to be forced to descend to Earth. Barber admits that this “the strangest [element] of all” and flounders without a context to relate it to. If you refer to the tradition of Fairies, however, you will immediately find this story to describe how the fairies came into being (for example “The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries” by Evans-Wentz has many recorded variants on this theme). Of course you still need to examine whether the Celtic oral tradition pre-dated the Grail romances but surely the effort is worthwhile and there appear to be numerous other parallels (and I’m in no way a Celtic/Fairy expert) one more of which is the magical feasts in a castle which appears deserted (sometimes even ruined) when the human awakes the next morning. Lastly, I agree with Barber that the particular incarnation of the Grail appearing in the Grail romances relates directly to the Eucharist. There is a 15th Century manuscript of the “Lebar Brecc” which appears to be a compilation of much earlier material (possibly some are a translation from 10th Century Latin sources) and this contains descriptions of the Eucharist ritual in use by the Church at this time so again it would be interesting to see whether there were any parallels between the Celtic source and these stories.

I like the way he depicts the search for the Holy Grail in the later part of the book as a, well, search for the Holy Grail with the various would-be historical detectives chasing after a will o’ the wisp forever just out of reach and he rightfully highlights Umberto Eco as the postmodern Grailmeister extraordinaire. However, Michael Moorcock gets no mention for his take on the Grail in The War Hound and the World’s Pain (his Von Bek series).

He also acknowledges the Jungian theory of archetypes and even admits that he has no problem with the Grail as an archetypal image but he doesn’t pursue this line which I suppose is understandable given the amount of additional material this could produce. However, if this approach is accepted as valid, then the attempt to identify expressions of the “grail” archetype in earlier (or later) cultures (which Barber otherwise frowns upon) could throw some further light upon the specifically Eucharistic Grail images on which he exclusively concentrates.

In this vein, if Doctor Who is an embodiment of the Phoenix archetype, does this mean that Billie Piper is the Grail maiden and the TARDIS the latest expression of the Grail, a nexus of heaven and earth, appearing out of thin air to bring healing to a wounded land?

I?ve just finished Susanna Clarke?s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and can?t recommend it highly enough.

It?s being marketed as Harry Potter for grown-ups; the comparison is a little misleading (among children?s writers, Clarke is much closer to Dianna Wynne-Jones than to Rowling), but it captures the novel?s likely appeal to people who don?t usually read fantasy. JSAMN lacks most of the usual apparatus of the genre (dragons, rings and what-have-you), but still has something of its flavour. It?s a sly, funny, intelligent novel, and in its own way, quite subversive.

JSAMN depicts the return of magic to an England where history was quite different (magic once worked), but has resulted in an early nineteenth century very like our own. In Clarke?s England, magic stopped working some three centuries before JSAMN, as a result of the disappearance of John Uskglass, the Raven King, a magician who had carved out a separate kingdom for himself in the North of the country. As the novel opens, magic is of interest only to provincial antiquarian societies. This changes as two new magicians emerge – first, the quasi-recluse and pedant, Mr. Norrell, and then his pupil and rival, Jonathan Strange, an altogether more attractive and Byronic figure. They have very different views of what magic is and how it should be treated. Norrell wishes to sanitize and deracinate it, while Strange wants to give it free rein, to discover who the Raven King was, and perhaps to bring him back. This conflict drives the main part of the novel, although it eventually becomes clear that their disagreement is only the prelude to a much deeper set of changes. In the closing chapters, the reader realizes that Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell are more done upon than doers.

Clarke?s writing is a delight. Her prose has the rhythms of nineteenth century language, but there?s no fustiness; it?s lively and compelling. An example:

In the end is it not futile to try and follow the course of a quarrel between husband and wife? Such a conversation is sure to meander more than any other. It draws in tributary arguments and grievances from years before – all quite incomprehensible to any but the two people they concern most nearly. Neither party is ever proved to be right or wrong in such a case, or, if they are, what does it signify?

Writing of this quality (and there are other gems like this passage scattered through the text) is a joy to read. The observations are sharp and acute, and there?s a sureness of tone that is extraordinary in a first novel – note the implicit metaphor of a river that organizes the passage without ever being stated directly. Still, there is the question of whether or not the prose style conducts well with the underlying theme. John Clute?s review of Jonathan Strange suggests otherwise:

the crystalline civility of the Austenesque voice begins to baulk its author?s clear need to begin to convey something of the smell of worlds beyond the fields we know as the novel (whose story we?re almost ready to hint at) begins to pry the gates open. In the end, in other words, that civility of language works as an engine to maintain the world, not to change it, an effect only intensified by Clarke?s great skill at deploying Austen; in the end, it is a civil language, wedded to the thinning it depicts.

Clute?s review is very perceptive, but on this point he?s only half-right. As he suggests, the civilty of the tone surely reflects the comfortable assumptions of the nineteenth century English upper classes. However, both this voice, and the deviations from it that increase in frequency towards the end of the novel, strike me as a conscious choice on the part of the author, and a quite successful choice at that. She uses it to convey the overall impression of a self-assured social order that is beginning gradually to fragment as history returns to England. The main course of the novel obliquely comments upon the problematic foundations of the English social hierarchy through the lived experience of the black servant, Stephen, the refugee engravers Minervois and Forcalquier, and Mr. Norrell?s dogsbody, the enigmatic Childermass (perhaps the most interesting character in the novel). On those rare occasions where Clarke (or her unseen narrator) speak directly to the implied codes and rankings of gentle society, her judgements are no less savage for their understatement.

Hadley-Bright and Purfois were well-born English gentlemen, while Tom was an ex-dancing-master whose forefathers had all been Hebrew. Happily, Hadley-Bright and Purfois took very little notice of such distinctions of rank and ancestry. Knowing Tom to be the most talented amongst them, they generally deferred to him in all matters of magical scholarship, and, apart from calling him by his given name (while he addressed them as Mr Purfois and Mr Hadley-Bright) and expecting him to pick up books they left behind them, they were very much inclined to treat him as an equal.

It is just this set of assumptions, and the social order that it supports, which is beginning to give way as the book finishes. There are rumours of unrest from the fringes of the kingdom, as craftsmen and skilled labourers riot and break up the machines that are replacing them. John Uskglass (who is both protagonist and myth) starts to become a sort of Captain Swing or Ned Ludd to whom the insurrectionaries swear allegiance. The return of magic in Clarke?s book gains much of its metaphoric power from its consonance with the social unrest of our own nineteenth century; magic, as it escapes the control of Mr. Norrell and Jonathan Strange (both of whom have become agents of the state) begins to assume a distinctly radical tinge. One of the most important conversations in the book takes place between the unpleasant Mr. Lascelles (a type of the less radical Whig) and a domestic servant.

Lucas glanced up at him. He said, ?We have been discussing what to do, sir. We shall leave within the half hour. We can do Mr Norrell no good by staying here and may do ourselves some harm. That is our intention, sir, but if you have another opinion I shall be glad to hear it.?

?My opinion!? exclaimed Lascelles. He looked all amazement, and only part of it was feigned. ?This is the first time I was ever asked my opinion by a footman. Thank you, but I believe I shall decline my share of this ?? He thought for a moment, before settling upon the most offensive word in his vocabulary. ?? democracy.?

Lascelle and his class are on the losing side of history; he finishes very badly.1 As Faerie and magic irrupt into England, it becomes increasingly clear that there will be no room for gentleman-magicians like Strange and Norrell – the winds of history are blowing through doors that have been re-opened, and everything is about to change. Clarke?s language in the closing sections of the book reflects this, as the assured diction of the early nineteenth century novel increasingly gives way to something starker, wilder, stranger. She plans two more books in the series – it?s a safe bet that they will show us a very different England than the rather complacent country seen at the beginning of JSAMN. If they live up to the standard set by this first volume, it will be a quite extraordinary achievement.

1 After demonstrating his contempt for Mr. Norrell?s servant Childermass, , Lascelle finds himself trapped in Faerie as a direct result of his snobbery and perverted sense of noblesse oblige. The more pragmatic and flexible Childermass has already avoided the same trap.

Update: for more discussion of the Susanna Clarke/J.K. Rowling question (as well as some ill-tempered and ill-informed claims about Steven Brust and Emma Bull?s spiffy novel of Chartism, Freedom and Necessity), see this lengthy discussion thread at Electrolite.