Skip to main content

Week Eight: Contemporary Fantasy - Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Suzanna Clark (# 6 points)

 


Jonathan Strange and. Mr. Norrell is a fantasy novel that is very realistic to call it fantasy. 
 
The background of the story is England, so that made me compare this story with Harry Potter, while I read it. In Harry Potter, the theme of magic and wizard was expressed in a more unrealistic and imaginary way, but in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, two characters who can do real magic were actively engaged in real-life events like the war between Great Britain and France, and the real historical figure like Napoleon appears in the story, so the writer combines the history of the United Kingdom and the magical world. It’s like the history of the magical world that the writer created flows away with the real history of England. And I think this makes me feel like the magic in this story could be possible or exist. 
 
Featuring wizards and fairies, this work tells a very dark and fantastic story, and, of course, it is fiction. However, the author does not show such a fantasy from the beginning. Magic and a fantastic world didn’t seem normal in misty England after the Industrial Revolution. People grow up listening to the existence of a fairy, but other than that, they have a complete modern way of thinking. At the point where magic is handed down only as a tradition and record, even the people who call themselves magicians do not believe in real magic except for very few people. They accuse people who claim to do real magic of being scammers. And when someone who actually uses magical abilities appears in front of them, they just want him to provide eye candy at social parties instead of helping people with magical powers or fulfilling a mission to revive British magic.
 
Above all, it is the very human protagonists that make this work more realistic. The characters in this work are not beautiful and powerful wizards or warriors. The protagonists Norell and Jonathan Strange are ordinary people who are whimsical and have flaws. 
 
In addition, another realistic aspect of this work is that it reflects the human relationship in reality that no one can conclude as good or bad by showing the complex and diverse psychological states and behaviors of humans instead of the typical good versus evil confrontation structure that is commonly shown. Norell and Strange scratch and hurt each other, but their relationship is a relationship of love and hatred, which is entangled as a rival of fate and the only one who can understand each other.
 
Their confrontation is not something that the protagonist ends in victory by defeating the Demon King. At the end of the work, it is impossible to say who won and who lost, another problem follows the solved problem, and the love-hate relationship between the protagonists becomes more subtle. It feels like their stories will continue, that cannot finish with the phrase 'they lived happily well.’ 
 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week Eleven: Cyberpunk and Steampunk - Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (# 6 points)

  The shock of using VR devices for the first time is still unforgettable. It’s still a little closer to the virtual side than to the real one, but it was still amazing. Since then, I have been interested in virtual reality and augmented reality, and have started to read related articles and books. It was difficult to fully understand, but I was convinced that the technology would gradually focus on making virtual realities more realistic. VR appeared in the mid-2010s, but there was someone who came up with this concept 20 years before this. It’s Neal Stephenson, the writer of ‘Snow Crash’, and the novel ’Snow Crash’ is a book that enables us to approach the world of virtual reality more easily.  Considering this book was published in 1992, I’m really surprised that the story described in this novel is almost close to the world right now, where a lot of Internet-related technologies have made remarkable development. ‘Metaverse’ the virtual place that the comput...
1 comment
Read more

Week Fourteen: Speculative Satire - Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (# 6 points)

  A huge joke on a cosmic scale!  I think if I define Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in one sentence, it seems like this can be said. The book is full of humor and jokes. The author is expressing his ingenious imagination regardless of any form and authority. In this book, things like the logical rationale and the probability of the story are not important. Unlike hard Science Fiction, which elaborately unfolds a story based on scientific theory, the charm of this book lies in the writer’s imagination and humor. As we can see from the setting that the Earth is a supercomputer designed by a super-intelligent race, the book shows the adventure of countless unique people and events between space and Earth, and prehistoric times and 5.6 trillion years later.    Even the most entertaining jokes can get tired after hours of listening. To keep laughing and induce fun, we need a narrative device that will arouse the readers’ curiosity and tension...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week Nine: New Frontier - The Martian by Andrew Weir (# 5 points)

  I watched the movie ‘Martian’ first before I read this book. I saw the interesting fact about this novel that the writer, Andy Weir, was not a writer and he dabbled in writing a novel while he was working as a computer programmer. He published ‘Martian’ at his own expense to share the story with his friends, and as his novel has become more famous, he got a contract with a publisher, and his novel was made into a film, Martian. I really enjoyed the movie as well, so I was curious about Martian as a novel.  Mars, a planet that ordinary people cannot visit, and this environment setting is quite attractive and attracts the readers. In addition to this, the starting point of this story, losing one of the operators, Mark Watney, due to a sudden sand storm when returning from the mission, is enough to stimulate the interest.  The most impressive scene in this work is the words Mark Watney speaks at the beginning of the work, “I’m pretty much fucked. That’s my cons...
Post a Comment
Read more