The voice of the earlier book was ironic, a self-conscious pastiche of Jane Austen at her wryest.
These epigraphs could have served well enough to whet the appetite for a further course of the epic and fantastical Regency adventure that she served up in the breathtaking Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004). The second is from a certain Laurence Arne-Sayles, who turns out to be a figure from within the fiction we are about to read, declaring himself a scholar of the forgotten, of the “curious gaps between things”. The first of Susanna Clarke’s epigraphs to her mysterious new novel, our first clues to what it might be about, is from a remark of the odious amateur magician Uncle Andrew Ketterley from C S Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, declaring himself “the adept, who is doing the experiment.
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