Susanna Clarke's debut novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel, is the rare book that manages to elevate its allusions to metafiction without teasing Delillian self-reference. But just as it's a story of two magicians bringing the long-lost art of magic back to England, it's also a novel that wheels hundreds of geriatric genres back into the sunlight in an unexpectedly exciting and readable new form.

I won't even try to summarize the plot of Strange and Norrel, which at eight hundred pages still overflows its banks into dozens of footnotes before filtering back down into some immense underground resevoir of the author's imagination. Since the plot concerns the unexpected return of magic to an unprepared world, the novel has been called Harry Potter for adults, and Bloomsbury, Rowling's publisher as well as Clarke's, has certainly been hyping that blurb as much as it can -- the company has such high expectations that it started a US division solely to publish the book, and its first print run is rumored to be 250,000. Not bad for a first novel.

Clarke claims to have begun her novel in 1992, well before Pottermania, but it seems unlikely she was completely uninfluenced by Rowling's success. Still, the comparisons between the books are superficial. Clarke does not play to adolescent fantasies of suddenly discovering one has secret powers, and her writing shows much mroe craft than Rowling's. The book doesn't steal from Rowling much, at least not as much as it does from Dickens' charicatures, Jane Austen's comedies of manners, Tolkien's exhaustive fantastical backstory, C.S. Lewis's religious allegory, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream as reinterpreted by Neil Gaiman, dark and druggy reality-bending (Lovecraft?), historical fiction, war narrative, and dozens of other, distinctly British subgenres which seemed to have disappeared meaningfully from the landscape with the passing of their authors. They all can be felt in the undercurrents of Clarke's book. Indeed, Lord Byron even appears as a minor character.

This novel probably isn't quite the masterpiece it's being hyped as. No character escapes caricature, but Clarke's elastic language manages to keep the same motifs fresh and exciting for almost 800 pages. In the tradition of the old novels it emulates, the beginning of Strange and Norrel is dull and the acceleration is not fast. But I'm finding fault simply for the sake of providing a balanced review. This novel ranges wide over every scrap of writing that's ever been read and forgotten about and borrows a little here, a little there, creating its own rules as it goes and never quite showing its hand. I won't be sure whether it's a good novel or a great novel until I reread it. But unlike most novels of this length, I plan to someday.