regshoe

Chapter 64:

‘After all,’ [Lascelles] thought, ‘what can a magician do against a lead ball? Between the pistol firing and his heart exploding, there is no time for magic.’

Chapter 67:

Childermass aimed the right-hand pistol somewhat wide of the man’s left shoulder, intending to frighten him away. The pistol fired perfectly; a cloud of smoke and a smell of gunpower rose from the pan; sparks and more smoke disgorged from the barrel.

But the lead refused to fly. It hung in the air as if in a dream. It twisted, swelled and changed shape. Suddenly it put forth wings, turned into a lapwing and flew away.

:)

• When the gentleman gives Stephen the orb, crown and sceptre, the narrator makes a point of telling us that the orb is decorated with one of the gentleman’s own symbols, rather than a cross as one belonging to the King of England (for example) would have. In other words, Stephen isn’t just attired as a king—he’s attired as the king of Lost-hope. Subtle!
  
• I really appreciate that in the little Mansfield Park re-enactment, the role of Henry Crawford is played by Lascelles, generally agreed to be a terrible person, and he’s unambiguously in the wrong for the whole thing. I feel vindicated in my hatred. (I do wonder whether Lascelles has a sister, however…)
• John Uskglass’s kingdom ‘encompassed Cumberland, Northumberland, Durham, Yorkshire, Lancashire and part of Nottinghamshire’ (the part north of the Trent, apparently). This list really ought to include Westmorland, and I’m not sure why it doesn’t (Westmorland doesn’t exist as an official county anymore, but it did at the time the narrator is supposedly writing—and it was combined with Cumberland to make the new county of Cumbria, so a list that includes Cumberland should definitely include Westmorland too). I’m also a bit surprised Cheshire isn’t there, though that was presumably deliberate. Perhaps Uskglass just didn’t want to deal with another border.
• One of Jonathan Strange’s horses is called Starling. I wonder if he did that on purpose?

So, this conversation:

And, while I was about it, I told him much more. Eloquently enough, I daresay, I gave him chapter and verse of my hopeless struggle, my inevitable defeat; for hopeless and inevitable they were to a man with my record, even though that record was written only in one’s own soul. It was the old story of the thief trying to turn honest man; the thing was against nature, and there was an end of it.

Raffles entirely disagreed with me. He shook his head over my conventional view. Human nature was a board of chequers; why not reconcile one’s self to alternate black and white? Why desire to be all one thing or all the other, like our forefathers on the stage or in the old-fashioned fiction? For his part, he enjoyed himself on all squares of the board, and liked the light the better for the shade. My conclusion he considered absurd.

“But you err in good company, Bunny, for all the cheap moralists who preach the same twaddle: old Virgil was the first and worst offender of you all. I back myself to climb out of Avernus any day I like, and sooner or later I shall climb out for good.”

These views (and I think they’re both being honest here about what they really think, which of course is not necessarily the same thing as being right about themselves) are really interesting in the context of what happens now and later on. It’s made fairly clear (and stated explicitly in ‘Out of Paradise’) that for Bunny at least, the centre of his ‘struggle’ is not crime itself but Raffles. He may not be able to stay away now, but he gives up crime once Raffles is gone. I wonder how much he realised that, at this point? He doesn’t seem to have said so to Raffles, in any case—but then, he wouldn’t.

As for Raffles, he’s conflating two different things here, apparently without realising it. There’s his ‘alternate black and white’, which I think does describe him pretty well, and he does seem reconciled to it; but giving up crime altogether and 'climb[ing] out of Avernus’ is another thing entirely, and a much more doubtful one. He never does manage it, at least not permanently—he may have been an ‘absolutely honest man’ for eight months in Naples, but could he have done it for ever?

• It’s something to keep in mind about Jonathan Strange’s character that he knows (or at least, has been told and is probably fairly certain) that John Uskglass appeared to these women and helped them. I mean, I don’t want to gloat, but I think it certainly informs his motivations in the later part of Strange & Norrell, and is obviously very relevant in the last few chapters.
• Cassandra Parbringer/Mrs Field OTP. Also Jane Tobias/Emma Pole. I’m convinced they all get together after the ending of Strange & Norrell and form a society of female magicians, together with Flora Greysteel and Miss Redruth and various others. I’m also convinced that Jane Tobias doesn’t really die in 1819 but disappears into some magical realm where she and Emma live happily ever after. (Look, I can headcanon what I want).
• The story that Cassandra tells about the child John Uskglass, and the later scene that calls back to it (why should I be afraid?) have the same sort of odd mixture of eeriness and bleakness and comfort and depth about them that some of the best parts of Strange & Norrell have. I love this thing very much.

• There are eight different names and titles used to refer to this character over the course of the book: the Raven King, the Black King, the King of/in the North, the King, John Uskglass, John d’Uskglass, the nameless slave, and an unknown word in a language of Faerie that supposedly means ‘Starling’.
  
• It’s a plot point that none of these names is actually the character’s ‘true name’ in a magically meaningful sense, and he considered himself to be nameless because he was taken into Faerie before he could be christened. However he was presumably christened at some point, after his return to England — he at least behaves as a Christian as king. The name he used at this point was probably John d’Uskglass, after his Norman (supposed) father, and it’s interesting that this apparently doesn’t make it his true name.
• John Uskglass and the Raven King are by far the most frequently used names. However, John Uskglass doesn’t appear at all until page 396, after which it gradually takes over from the Raven King as the most used name. I’m not sure why this is — perhaps it’s part of the gradual demystification of the character that we increasingly hear him called by a more ordinary-sounding human name, or perhaps Clarke/the narrator is hiding, in the early part of the book, just how important the character is going to be by concealing who the title of the third volume refers to.
• The Raven King is not a unique name, and has applied to other characters before. Possibly the original Raven King is the Welsh mythological King Brân the Blessed (his name literally means ‘crow’ or ‘raven’), who is associated with all sorts of interestingly relevant ideas about mythological kingship and the relationship between the king and the land, and with the Arthurian legends and the story of the Fisher King — and, incidentally, one story that involves an important starling.
• d’Uskglass is a strange name, and an evocative one (it always reminds me of ‘we see through a glass darkly’ — the image of a dusky mirror imperfectly reflecting the world, or perhaps reflecting something other than the world we think is real, is beautifully appropriate — and the rest of that passage is surprisingly relevant too). It and its original bearer are both Norman French, but Uskglass appears to be an older English place name, and its actual etymology seems to be Celtic (in which case it would mean something like ‘blue-green water’). Perhaps this unclear mix of sources reflects the messy reality behind the idea of Englishness and English magic as single coherent things.
• The language of Faerie in which he was first named is supposedly related to the Celtic languages. In both Irish and Scottish Gaelic, the word for ‘starling’ is druid. This must be an out-of-universe pun rather than anything significant, since this word has no actual relation to the English word ‘druid’, but still.

From The Ladies of Grace Adieu, by Susanna Clarke:

“I am a human child and all the vast stony, rainy English earth belongs to me. I am an English child and all the wide grey English air, full of black wings beating and grey ghosts of rain sighing, belongs to me. This being so, Robin Goodfellow, tell me, why should I be afraid?”

From Maurice, by E. M. Forster:

But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions’ who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls.

…I’d write a long sensible post about the parallels here, and how these very different books are really saying similar things: both are about the very people who are oppressed and marginalised by English society taking back symbolic ownership of the land itself, whether that’s done using magic or otherwise (it’s significant that the first quote is probably not something John Uskglass ever actually says, but a story told about him centuries later by the magicians of England — this is how they choose to remember him), but I’m not literary enough to do that, so have this ‘put the quotes together and point at them emphatically’ thing instead.