Nonesuch by Francis Spufford

 

It's interesting to see a writer as serious (and as Serious) as Spufford write something so like Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, not so much in the shape of the story (as I remember Clarke's novel) but more in the weird specifics of the premise--magic is real in ways with the historic practices and writings, and England is under threat. The magic is less explicitly Fey than in the Clarke, and the threat is Nazi Germany, but the larger pictures are very similar. The POV character is a woman, and sexism is a large part of her experience: she plays against it as something of a "bad girl" and then working to make her life better as much as she can with in the constraints she lives under. There is a sense of the magic of the world revealing itself to the POV character, but there's a misunderstanding of the nature of that magic, and at the end the main character seems to have fixed something important from her youth at the price of losing much of who she is. There's another novel coming, which will probably solve (or resolve) that. The writing here is of course very good, on just about all levels, and I'll read whatever that other novel is once Spufford publishes it; I'll probably reread this shortly before that, which is fine, I won't mind.