Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: My Admiration Does Not Lessen My Hatred One Whit

Fantasy kinda sucks. As a longtime fan of the genre, I’ve somewhat earned some right to say that.

• While “Harry Potter” is fun to read — excepting the fifth book — its colorful characters and whimsical settings are bogged down by weak writing.
• “His Dark Materials” has similar strengths and flaws, and was worsened even further by the author’s tendency to proselytize.
• “The Wheel of Time” cribs liberally from Tolkien — an author who wrote his books solely because he liked making up languages.
• The worst of all of them is that “Eragon” series; it reads like it was written by a 19-year-old homeschooler from Montana. In part because it was.
• Among good modern fantasists, Neil Gaiman tends to exhibit the same self-indulgent fascination with multi-pantheon crossovers in whatever he writes, leaving Terry Brooks alone above reproach; it helps that Brooks doesn’t take his fantasy settings seriously.

It’s become a rule, therefore, that fantasy as a whole is a thin, shallow genre of fiction with especially egregious pretensions that it has meaningful depth and that it’s romanticism profound rather than transparent. Science fiction, unfortunately, is much of the same. Fortunately, because the overall crappiness of fantastic literature is a rule, there are going to be exceptions. I just spent the better part of two days — almost spilling over into three — reading one of the most important and, dare I say, literary exceptions in recent memory.