The View from the Cheap Seats

by Neil Gaiman

  But fairy fruit is still being smuggled over the border from Fairyland. Eating it gives strange visions and can drive people to madness and beyond. The fruit is so illegal that it cannot even be named: smugglers of fruit are punished for smuggling silk, as if the changing of the name will change the thing itself.

  The mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist, Nat Chanticleer, is less prosaic than he would have others believe. His life is a fiction he subscribes to, or would like to, of a sensible life like everyone else’s—and particularly like the dead that he admires. His world is a shallow thing, though, as he will soon learn: without his knowledge, his young son, Ranulph, has been fed fairy fruit.

  Now the fairy world—which is also, as in all the oldest folktales, the world of the dead—begins to claim the town: a puck named Willy Wisp spirits away the lovely young ladies of Miss Crabapple’s Academy for young ladies, over the hills and far away; Chanticleer stumbles upon the fruit smugglers, and his life takes a turn for the worse; Duke Aubrey is sighted; old murders will out; and, in the end, Chanticleer must cross the Elfin Marches to rescue his son.

  The book begins as a travelogue or a history, becomes a pastorale, a low comedy, a high comedy, a ghost story and a detective story. The writing is elegant, supple, effective and haunting: the author demands a great deal from her readers, which she repays many times over.

  The magic of Lud-in-the-Mist is built from English folklore—it is not such a great step from Aubrey to Oberon, after all; Willy Wisp’s “Ho-ho-hoh” is Robin Goodfellow’s, from a song they say Ben Jonson wrote; and it will not come as a surprise to the folklorist that old Portunus says nothing and eats live frogs. The “lily, germander and sops in wine” song is first recorded in the seventeenth century, under the name of “Robin Good-Fellow; or, The Hob-Goblin.”

  I have seen editions of Lud-in-the-Mist which proclaim it to be a thinly disguised parable for the class struggle. Had it been written in the 1960s it would, I have no doubt, have been seen as a tale about mind-expansion. But it seems to me that this is, most of all, a book about reconciliation—the balancing and twining of the mundane and the miraculous. We need both, after all.

  It is a little golden miracle of a book, adult, in the best sense, and, as the best fantasy should be, far from reassuring.

  * * *

  Originally published in the “Curiosities” section of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1999.

  * * *

  The Thing of It Is: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

  This is a very poor introduction to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (whose name rhymes, by the way, with quarrel, or with sorrel, the way Susanna Clarke pronounces it), and an equally meager introduction to the person of Susanna Clarke. They both deserve better. Notwithstanding, it is my story, and I shall tell it my way, which is the story of how I became aware of Susanna Clarke and of her book.

  When our story begins, I was a scribbling person who made stories and such.

  I moved to America from England in 1992, and I missed my friends, so I was exceedingly delighted when the post brought a large envelope from one of them, a Mr. Colin Greenland. Mr. Greenland had been one of the first persons I had encountered a decade earlier, when I had stumbled into the worlds of science fiction and of fantasy: an elfin gentleman with a faintly piratical air, who wrote excellent books. Inside the envelope was a letter, in which Mr. Greenland explained that he had just taught a writing workshop, and that one of the writers at the workshop was a remarkable woman of great talent, and that he wished me to read her work. He enclosed an extract from a short story.

  I read it, and wrote back, and demanded more.

  This came as some surprise to Susanna Clarke, who had no idea that Colin had sent me an extract from “The Ladies of Grace Adieu.” Gamely, though, she sent me the rest of the story. I loved everything about it: the plot, the magic, the glorious way Susanna put words together, and was particularly delighted by the information in the cover letter that Susanna was writing a novel set in the world of the tale, and that it would be called Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell—so delighted that I sent the story to an editor of my acquaintance. He called Susanna and asked to buy her story for an anthology he was editing.

  This came, again, as some surprise to Susanna Clarke, once she had established that this was none of it a prank (for after all, it is hard enough to sell short stories in this world, but to sell your first short story when you had not even sent it to an editor borders on the unlikely, and crosses that border).

  I was excited by the prospect of meeting Susanna Clarke, and when I did finally meet her it was in the company of Colin Greenland, who had, shortly after their first encounter, persuaded her to entertain his suit (an odd expression, now I come to write it down. I mean that they had become lovers and partners, not that he had removed his clothes and left them with her while she performed small puppet shows for them). From the stories of hers that I had read—Ms. Clarke sent me her short stories when she wrote them, every year or so, with a note telling me she was still writing the novel—I was expecting someone of a fey disposition, perhaps slightly out of her own Time, and was pleasantly surprised myself to meet a sharp, smart woman with a ready smile and easy wit, who loved to talk books and authors. I took particular delight in how well she understood high and low culture, and how comfortably she went between them, seeing them (correctly, in my opinion) not as opposites to be reconciled but as different ways of addressing the same ideas.

  For the next decade, people would ask me who my favorite authors were, and I would place Susanna Clarke on any lists I made, explaining that she had written short stories, only a handful but that each was a gem, that she was working on a novel, and that one day everyone would have heard of her. And by everyone, I meant only a small number of people, but those who counted. I assumed that the work of Susanna Clarke was a refined taste that would be too unusual and strange for the general public.

  In February 2004, to my perplexity and my delight, the mail brought an advance, but finished, copy of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I took my daughters on holiday to the Cayman Islands and, while they romped and swam in the surf, I was hundreds of years and thousands of miles away, in Regency York and in London and on the Continent, experiencing nothing but the purest pleasure, wandering through the words and the things they brought with them, and eventually noticing that the paths and lanes of the story, with its footnotes and its fine phrases, had become a huge road, and it was taking me with it. Seven Hundred and Eighty-Two Pages, and I enjoyed every page and when the book was done I could happily have read seven hundred and eighty-two more. I loved the things she said and the things she did not say. I loved crabbed Norrell and, less feckless than he seems, Strange, and John Uskglass the Raven King, who is not in the title of the book unless he hides behind the ampersand, but who hovers there anyhow. I loved the supporting players, and the footnotes, and the author—she is not, I am convinced, Ms. Clarke, but a character in her own right, writing her book closer to Strange and Norrell’s time than our own.

  I wrote about the experience of reading the book in my online journal, and I wrote to Susanna’s editor telling her that it was to my mind the finest work of English fantasy written in the previous seventy years. (I was thinking that the only thing it could be compared to was Hope Mirrlees’s novel Lud-in-the-Mist. Sometimes people would ask me about Tolkien, and I would explain that I did not, and do not, think of The Lord of the Rings as English Fantasy but as High Fantasy.) It was a novel about the reconciliation of the mundane and the miraculous, in which the world of faerie and the world of men are, perhaps, not as divided as they appear, but might simply be different ways of addressing the same thing.

  I was right about how good a book it was, and how much people would like it. I was wrong about one thing, and one thing only, in that I had thought that Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell would be a book for the few—that it would touch only a handful of people, and those people deeply, and when they encountered each other they wou
ld speak of Arabella, or Stephen Black, or of Childermass or the Gentleman with the Thistle-Down Hair in the way that people talk of old acquaintances, and bonds of friendship would be formed between strangers. I daresay they do, and they are, but there are not a tiny handful of them but an army as big as Wellington’s, or bigger. The book became that rare thing, a fine and wonderful book that found its readers, all across the world, and was garlanded and lauded and awarded and acclaimed.

  And it is with that thought that this introduction comes to an end.

  I am delighted to report, by way of postscript, that Ms. Clarke has remained quite unspoiled by success, and that she is the same sharp, smart woman with the same ready wit whom I met over a decade ago, and though her hair has now turned completely white, it has done so in an elegant and stylish way which means she cuts an imposing figure on the back of book jackets. Colin Greenland, on the other hand, has become significantly less elfin as the years have gone by, but what he has lost in elvishness he has made up for in wizardliness, and now gives the vague impression that he is merely waiting for a team of hobbits to pass by in order to send them upon an adventure, although the piratical glint in his eye would cause me to think twice about going on such an adventure were I one of those hobbits and not, as I am, a scribbling person.

  * * *

  My introduction to a 2009 edition of Susanna Clarke’s novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

  * * *

  On Richard Dadd’s The Fairy-Feller’s Master-Stroke

  Much of the Tate Gallery’s Pre-Raphaelite collection is in Washington, DC, as I write this, and the Pre-Raphaelite paintings they have left have been folded into a Victorian room. I am told that when they return, it will be to a gallery organized by time period and not by artistic school. This makes sense to me.

  I am in the Tate Gallery to have my photograph taken, and I am standing beside the one painting I want to talk about, early in the morning. No crowds. I tell the photographer about the history of the painting, and the painter, while getting increasingly irritated with a smudgy blotch on the glass, at the top right, and eventually I take out a cloth for cleaning off my computer’s screen and I scrub vigorously at the glass until it is clean. Nobody comes and arrests me, which is, I decide, a good thing.

  I am able, with no one else around, to stare at the painting until I have had my fill, but when the photographer moves me on to other places in the gallery I am still not satisfied.

  There is a small plaque beside the painting, which says: Presented by Siegfried Sassoon in memory of his friend and fellow officer Julian Dadd, a great-nephew of the artist, and of his two brothers who gave their lives in the First World War. It has been in the Tate’s collection since 1963.

  Reason tells me that I would have first encountered the painting itself, the enigmatically titled Fairy-Feller’s Master-Stroke, reproduced, pretty much full-sized, in the foldout cover of a Queen album, at the age of fourteen or thereabouts, and it made no impression upon me at all. That’s one of the odd things about it. You have to see it in the flesh, paint on canvas, the real thing, which used to hang, mostly, when it wasn’t traveling, in the Pre-Raphaelite room of the Tate Gallery, out of place among the grand gold-framed Pre-Raphaelite beauties, all of them so much more huge and artful than the humble fairy court standing among the daisies, for it to become real. And when you see it several things will become apparent; some immediately, some eventually.

  I visited the Pre-Raphaelite room at the Tate first in my early twenties: in my teens I had loved the work of comic book artist Barry Windsor-Smith. He made no secret of his Pre-Raphaelite influences, and I wanted to see them close-up—Millais and Waterhouse and the rest. I went there, and I liked the paintings, and admired them, and decided that I did not like the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti as much as I rather suspected Dante Gabriel Rossetti had, and the Burne-Jones picture of the ladies going downstairs made me catch my breath.

  They had several Dadd paintings too, there almost by default, as if there was nowhere else to put them. I saw The Fairy-Feller’s Master-Stroke, and I was obsessed.

  The year before I had received a copy of a book to review, of photographs mostly taken by a Victorian doctor named Diamond, of the inmates of Bedlam. Hopeless bedraggled lunatics who wring their hands as they squint at the camera, posing awkwardly for the period of time it took for the photographs to be exposed; their faces are frozen, although their hands often blur into things like the wings of doves. Portraits in madness and pain, and in only one of the photographs in the book was a man, a lunatic like the others, actually doing something.

  The madman in the photograph, which was taken by Henry Hering in 1856, has a beard. He has an easel in front of him, on which he is executing an oval painting of remarkable intricacy. He stares craftily at the camera, and there is a small, fierce smile on his face. His eyes glitter. He looks squat and proud, and when, a year later, I saw, for the first time in the flesh, his masterpiece, The Fairy-Feller’s Master-Stroke, the first thing I realized was that the white-bearded sorrowful dwarf who dominates the center of the painting, staring out at the watcher, is Richard Dadd grown old.

  The visitors to the Tate Gallery who visit the Pre-Raphaelite rooms are there for their own reasons, and are responding to something distant and melodic. The Waterhouses and the Millaises and the Burne-Joneses exert their own magic: spectators wander past the paintings, their lives enriched and made special. The Dadd, on the other hand, is a snare, and those people with a place in their soul for it—and I am one of them—are hooked. We can stand in front of that painting for, literally, hours, lost in it, puzzling over these fairies and goblins and men and women, trying to understand their size, their shape, their eccentricities. Every time you look at it you discover something, someone, you have not seen before.

  Dadd knew who they were, the people in the painting. He knew their lives. He knew what they were. You know that when you see them. He wrote a poem about them, in Broadmoor, in 1865, called “Elimination of a Picture & Its Subject—Called the Feller’s Master Stroke.” That’s how we know the title. He was a better painter than he ever was a poet.

  If you’ve ever seen the painting reproduced, if you’re on a journey specifically to see it, then the next thing that will surprise you is the size. It’s smaller than you imagined—smaller than seems possible. There is so much to fit in, after all. The authorized Tate Gallery reproduction of The Fairy-Feller’s Master-Stroke I bought after seeing it the first time was almost twice the size of the picture itself, and was as unsatisfying as a photograph of a meal would be to a hungry man.

  The painting is not the reproduction. The thing itself, in its frame, has a magic—in the color, in the detail—that no photograph, no poster, no postcard, ever seems to begin to capture.

  So you look at the painting, seeing every brushstroke. Every nuance of paint on the daisies.

  And you can look at it for hours before you notice something else about the painting, something so big and strange and obvious you can’t understand why you didn’t see it at once, or why no one else has commented upon it.

  It’s not finished.

  Much of the bottom of the painting, where the color choices seem odd and washed out, is only outlined on the light brown of the undercoat that covers the canvas. The fawn-colored grass that pushes the eye up to the Feller himself is fawn because Dadd—who took many years to paint it—ran out of time. He gave it away before it was done.

  And there’s one final thing you will know, without question, if you’ve seen that painting in the flesh, and it’s this: he knew what he was painting. He had seen it, through those crafty eyes. He had gone on the great journey, the grandest of grand tours, and this was what he was bringing back.

  Those of us who write fantasies for a living know that we are doing it best when we tell the truth. There is something that people will respond to—the True Quill, a Texan writer I met once called it. My novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane includes a lady on a Sussex farm who
is older than the universe, and a strange flapping creature from somewhere outside space and time who comes into our young protagonist’s life in the form of an evil nanny. None of it’s true, except it feels right. It feels honest.

  Before his madness, before the murder of his father, before the ill-fated journey to France (he was arrested on a train, when he attacked a fellow passenger, on his way to Paris to kill the emperor), Dadd’s paintings are quite pretty, and perfectly ordinary: forgettable chocolate-box-cover concoctions of fairy scenes from Shakespeare. Nothing special or magical about them. Nothing that would make them last. Nothing true.

  And then he went mad. Not just a little bit mad, but quite spectacularly mad; a murderous patricidal madness of demons and Egyptian gods. He spent the rest of his life locked up—first in Bedlam, later one of the first prisoners in Broadmoor—and, after a while, he began to paint, trading his paintings for favors. Gone were the chocolate-box fairies of Come Unto These Yellow Sands. Now there was an intensity to his paintings and drawings of fairy courts, of Bible scenes, of his fellow inmates (real or imaginary), that makes those we have such treasures. They were worked on with an intensity and single-mindedness that is, quite simply, scary.

  He spent the rest of his life behind bars, locked up with the criminally insane, as criminally insane as any of them, but with a message for us from, as it were, the other side. Apart from this, his life was wasted.

  Still, he left us paintings, and riddles, and one unfinished painting, which continues to obsess. Angela Carter wrote an astonishing radio play, Come Unto These Yellow Sands, about the painting, Dadd’s life, Victorian art. I wrote a film treatment once in which the painting was a key, and came close once to organizing an anthology in which each story would be about one of the witnesses to the Fairy-Feller’s chestnut-smashing blow.