Although it has been released a year after the excellent first novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke’s collection of stories entitled The Ladies of Grace Adieu actually precedes the novel by date of authorship. Each of the tales contained within was written separately by Clarke and most have already been published in creative writing journals. They should be therefore read not as a follow-up to Jonathan Strange but rather as a prequel, or perhaps the literary equivalent of a Making of… DVD to accompany movie. As I read The Ladies of Grace Adieu, it became clear that these stories were experiments in character, voice and device, serving as preparation for the larger, successful project.
As with most preliminary experiments, the quality of results in the stories of Grace Adieu is uneven. I frequently winced at the faux dialect of Lickerish Hill: “I have seen far-awaie lights like silver starres among the dark trees. My mother was mayde and cook…”. And inconsistencies in the production of dialect abound, such as:
“I have lived all my life neare Lickerish Hill, but I never once sawe a Pharisee.”
“A Pharisee?” sayz Mr Aubrey. “What doe you meane, child?”…
“Oh!” sayz Dr Foxton, “‘Tis Fairies she meanes.”
“Yes, sayz I. “That is what I sayd. Pharisees.”
If the main character thinks “Fairies” is properly said as “Pharisees,” and she doesn’t hear the difference in conversation, she can’t relate a difference she doesn’t comprehend in the written recollection of this story. It’s one of a number of distracting mistakes in the collection, but I am inclined to forgive it and others because the later-written, earlier-published Jonathan Strange has no such mistakes, and because I found myself enjoying the stories as a peek into the emergence of good writing out of the amateurish.
The stories themselves suffer from a lack of understanding by Clarke regarding magic (pardon, “magick”) and fairies. What are the rules of magic? What are the motivations of fairies? In The Ladies of Grace Adieu, magic and fairies are merely inscrutable and do things for obscure reasons. Magic and fairies may be inscrutable and obscure to the humdrum humans in a story, and they may be inscrutable and obscure to the reader for a forgivable period, but they should never be obscure to the author, and here they are. I never found an “A-ha!” moment in these stories in which the moral system and motivations of the fairies or of the use of magic become clear. Plot difficulties are simply resolved by the unexplained, unmotivated intervention of magic, and that’s not really satisfying.
As Eddie Lenihan makes clear in the introduction to a collection of Irish fairy tales I’m reading now (Meeting the Other Crowd), the fairies have their reasons and their motivations, even though such motivations aren’t conventional by human standards. Lenihan treats the subject as non-fiction and Clarke treats it as fiction — and especially in the construction of fiction but even in non-fiction, “just because” or “for reasons unclear” is insufficient explanation. Yet I’m inclined to overlook this weakness in Grace Adieu too, because Clarke’s Jonathan Strange has a fully fleshed-out, artfully-unveiled moral system surrounding magic and Faerie, and because I enjoyed reading Clarke’s unsuccessful attempts at explanation in the light of her later success.
If you haven’t read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by all means read that book first; I have no reservations in recommending it. Once you have read Jonathan Strange, if you find yourself looking for something more to flesh out Clarke’s world, pick up a used copy of Grace Adieu or wait until it comes out in paperback.
I was glad to learn that Clarke’s relatively slim Grace Adieu comprises her earlier work, since that means she’s hopefully been working on something else since publication of Jonathan Strange. I hope to see a new novel of hers on the bookshelves soon.
