“The colour of heartache”

One of the more beau­ti­ful descrip­tions in _Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell_ is that of a par­tic­u­lar box, described as being “the colour of heartache.” I have, just this minute, fin­ished the book (well ahead of sched­ule I might add, what will I do the next three nights?) and as I am prone to do, I find myself think­ing and writ­ing with affec­ta­tions lifted from the book.

It was good, and it was worth it.

It starts off, for the first few hun­dred pages, a lit­tle slow. But it is very immer­sive, and the char­ac­ters you meet begin to grow and change in inter­est­ing ways. Not that they change, in fact, nobody really changes in the book–I think it is one of the themes–they are just revealed to be other than you thought they were. But as you are inces­santly bat­tered by the lan­guage and the cus­tom and the man­ner of these peo­ple, you begin to be drawn in by them.

I am par­tial to his­tor­i­cal fic­tion, and this is a good part that.

I found myself, at the end, skip­ping por­tions of para­graphs in a rush to know what hap­pens, and the end­ing does not dis­ap­point. I do wish to have some­one to speak with about it… so if you’ve read it, drop me a line. If you’ve not, but were think­ing about it, give it a try, it is surely in Libraries by now. Unless they’ve all been bought up!

I do much like the ver­sion I have, all hard­cover and black, with the paper edges torn roughly (a deckle-edge, I am told). It has a note on the type in the back, and a table of con­tents in front, oh, and an embossed raven on the spine. For a book that is, most cer­tainly, about books in no small degree, it is lovely.