Hi all! Long time no see! IRL has been very busy with me recently, leaving me with less free time than I used to have. On top of that, I've been busy visiting friends and family around the country over the past few weeks. And it turns out that any free time I did have to spare was spent on the recent BBC adaptation of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

It's been airing here for the past seven weeks and has just ended (it's still airing in the US for a few more weeks though). And I want to give you my thoughts about it.

Before we get onto it, you need to know this: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is one of the best fantasy stories I've ever read. It's one of the best pieces of fiction I've ever read. It is ever so well-written and clever. I AM A MASSIVE FAN. (Honestly, read it if you haven't done; it's highly enjoyable.)

So, as a fan, I was very excited to see a TV adaptation. How did I think it fared? Click read more to find out (warning: I will be discussing spoilers for the end of the book and the end of the TV show, so proceed with caution).

Let's have a table of contents to get us through this a bit more easily, shall we?

1. The Good
1.1. Costume and set design
1.2. The eye for detail
1.3. The acting
1.4. Mr Segundus gets his own section because he has stolen my heart

2. The Meh
2.1. Special effects
2.2. Direction and cinematography
2.3. Translating the world from the book
2.4. Depicting Faerie
2.5. The gentleman with the thistle-down hair gets his own section because he has broken my heart

3. The Ugly
3.1. The inadvertent racism gets its own section because it has plucked out my heart and left me feeling very confused and not a little disappointed

4. Good God let's have a conclusion

***

1. The Good

1.1. Costume and set design

Let's not beat about the bush. The TV show was gorgeous! No matter what else they did to it, it looked wonderful throughout. The period detail was splendid. You can tell that they threw a lot of money at this show. And almost everything looked exactly as it had done in my head when I read the book. The only real quibbles I had were with the Gentleman's crazy eyebrows, and with Drawlight's costume (Why the wig for Drawlight? Why?) Thankfully, Drawlight's characterisation didn't really suffer too much from the change.

When all's said and done, the show was very pretty to watch. It's what kept me coming back again and again.

1.2. The eye for detail

This point joins in with the last one. You can tell that throughout the show there was a real reverence for the detail of the source text. Swathes of dialogue were left in, almost exactly as they had been in the book. And there was a constant name-dropping of details from the book, right down to the names of the books in Norrell's library. They even mentioned John Hollyshoes! It was fun to catch those references. And if it weren't for other parts that I'll get to in a bit, it would have felt as if the people making this show really loved the book very much.

1.3. The acting

You couldn't fault the acting. I found it was all done very well. Some of the characters, such as Drawlight and Vinculus, were a little over the top, but that rather worked for their characters. Well done to the whole cast.

Out of everyone, Eddie Marsan as Norrell was my shining star. He stole almost every scene he was in, and gave such a nuanced performance that he added depth to the character. In the show you hated and empathised with Norrell at every step of the way; and that's exactly how it should be. And the way Norrell lit up to see Strange performing magic for the first time? Oh my. Oh my my my. Thank you, Eddie Marsan; you were wonderful.

Second place goes to Enzo Cilenti as Childermass. It's hard for me to be objective about this, because I love Childermass. Everyone loves Childermass. I doubt that anyone can see the show or read the book and not love Childermass. Enzo Cilenti was, admittedly, a little too pretty to play Childermass, but that aside he was Childermass in every other way. He was as Childermass as it was possible to get! Every slouch and every roll of the eyes embodied Childermass to perfection. We won't even talk about how wonderful it is to finally hear Childermass speaking in a Yorkshire accent (because I am terrible at imagining accents in my head when I'm reading). All of it was pitch-perfect. And when Childermass smiled that one time that Strange asked him to come and work with him? My heart stopped beating.

1.4. Mr Segundus gets his own section because he has stolen my heart

Mr Segundus was the surprising delight of the show, like an unexpected caramel centre in a bar of chocolate. Roughly 50% of my investment in the show was so I could watch Segundus in action again. He is a darling of epic proportions. I am in love. There is nothing to be done.

Now, here's the thing. In the book, Segundus is utterly adorable. It is not possible to get more adorable than Segundus in the book. I didn't necessarily notice on my first read-through, but going back over parts of it, as I have done down the years, I was slowly struck but just how charming Segundus is as a character. In the TV show though? They've actually changed up Segundus' character a fair amount. I would class him as one of the characters who is least like the one I imagined in my head. I mean, he is still adorable, to be sure, but in the TV show he's far braver, far more excitable, far more willing to act first and think of the consequences later. These are not awful traits to have, of course, but they do take away from some of the quiet, intelligent modesty that makes Segundus in the book just as wonderful as he is.

So why, with all these changes, do I still say that Segundus in the show has stolen my heart? The answer is simple: HAVE YOU SEEN HIS BEAUTIFUL FACE. OR HIS BEAUTIFUL HAIR. Swooning. I am swooning. (Swooning even more than Segundus does in the book.) YOU ARE SO PRETTY, SIR. I was not expecting this! Even with the changes in characterisation, if you take a character who I had a major soft-spot for in the book and bring him to life looking like that, I am done for. Sigh. Sighhh. Can we have a sequel called "Mr Segundus does some magic and gets all excited about it?" I would watch it! Now please excuse me while I go listen to this on repeat.

***

2. The Meh

2.1. Special effects

I can't complain too much about this. The special effects in this show were... ok. They seemed a little BBC-budget to me. A little Doctor Who. Which is expected, to be honest, seeing as this is a TV show after all. While I would like to have had cinema-quality special effects, I know that that's not possible. And the special effects aren't really the point of the story anyway. So this goes in the meh section for me. It's not quite how I would have it in my ideal version, but they were pretty good for TV standards and definitely not a deal-breaker.

2.2. Direction and cinematography

Now this is in a similar vein. In my ideal show I would have cinematography to a higher standard. I want it to be cinema-quality. I want it to be good cinema-quality. What we got certainly wasn't bad, but it wasn't anything super special. With the special effects I had no reason to have expected more that we got. With this, though, not so much.

You see, the director for Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was Toby Haynes. The only thing I really remembered this guy for was "The Reichenbach Fall", being his episode of Sherlock. And that episode of Sherlock was stunningly beautiful. The way "The Reichenbach Fall" was shot was ever so cinematic. It was take your breath away stuff. I still get thrills when I think back to that wonderful panning shot of Moriarty on the roof, set to "Staying Alive". I thought that some of that beauty would transfer across to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. When TV becomes cinematic to watch, it can be astounding. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was not astounding. It was perfectly serviceable, yes, but it wasn't my ideal show.

My other point here is on "show not tell" and explaining things to the audience. Once again, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell did a perfectly fine job, but it wasn't amazing. It wasn't on that next level. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't anywhere near as bad as Poldark, which had so little faith in its audience that it would grind a plot point into your face with the heel of its boot to make sure you got it. But I am comparing it instead to the period drama that I really enjoyed earlier in the year, Wolf Hall. Now there was a case of "show not tell" done very well. A lot of people didn't like it, so ymmv, but I really liked that Wolf Hall didn't try to patronise the audience. You had to work hard for it and you had to concentrate (you'd be watching a scene, and only about five minutes in would you realise, 'oh shitting hell that's Thomas Cranmer'). I really enjoyed that about it. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, on the other hand, did not require that level of work from the audience. It was perfectly fine, as I say, and no worse than most TV shows, but I did feel that there were some parts in the show that were stated outright, whereas in the book the readers were given the joy of finding it out for themselves (like discovering that this is the Raven King when we finally meet him, for example). I'm just saying that in an ideal world, if this show was going to be utterly perfect in every way, I would have liked a little more subtlety and nuance.

2.3. Translating the world from the book

Now this is very difficult for me to judge, because I walked into the show already knowing everything about the world and the plot. I would be really interested to know what someone who was new to the TV show thought of the world of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Once again, this is me being a little unfair to the TV show, because there was never any way, in seven hours, that they could match up to the book. They probably did the best they could in the time available, and this is just one reason why the book gives you so much more than the TV adaptation.

Because, guys, the worldbuilding is the best part of the book. Susanna Clarke, the author, does it superbly. I have not seen a more fully realised world in any fantasy novel (save for those of Tolkien, and to be fair, he spent his whole life on it). It would be quite fair to say that half of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell the book is plot, and half is worldbuilding; and they are both as riveting as each other, and both intertwined of course. You feel, in the book, that this is a world you can step into. You feel, almost, as if you could go further, as if, with only the right access to the right books and the right journals, you could do your own research into this world and discover its secrets for yourself. The book is a journey of discovery in this world, and you feel, as you read it, as if there's some tantalising truth, hidden in there, just out of reach, that if you could grasp would explain everything. It is so cleverly done.

There is no way the TV show could match up to that. They did what they could, with adding background and texture, and with mentioning the Raven King. But they could have added more. There's always room for more. Imagine if they'd added the scene where John Uskglass, as a child, invades England. Imagine.

Hah. Perhaps I would have been happy with seven hours of worldbuilding and no plot.

2.4. Depicting Faerie

As part of the worldbuilding, the depictions of Faerie are some of my favourite bits of the book. Faerie feels very close in the book; it feels, for all its horrors, real. It's written in such a way that you feel like you could walk into Faerie by accident, just by going through the wrong door or taking the wrong turning. And it's always similar enough to the real world that you can never be entirely sure if you're in Faerie or just someplace very strange.

That feeling of Faerie being on the edges of everywhere would be hard to replicate on TV, but I still feel like they didn't try very hard. There were, what, three sets in Faerie in the TV show? The path to Lost Hope, the ballroom at Lost Hope and the Gentleman's dressing room at Lost Hope. And they all feel just like that: sets. Perhaps they were going for otherworldly, but it just came across as rather cheap and tacky (they could have done better by placing a skull here and there in a real forest to be honest). It just felt very self-contained in the show. Perhaps it was a budget issue? It's just a shame that the rest of the set design for the other parts of the show was so great; Faerie seemed like a let-down.

Maybe I'm being picky because I'm a big fan of Faerie. Ho hum. I'm just going to sit here and keep with the Faerie in my imagination (the one that involves me taking photographs of random pathways I find in the countryside, just in case they might lead somewhere interesting).

2.5. The gentleman with the thistle-down hair gets his own section because he has broken my heart

And here's a related point! The gentleman in the show really is nothing like the gentleman in the book, is he? I had thought, at the beginning, that this would be my least favourite part of the show, because it is my favourite part of the book and it is so unlike anything I imagined.

Don't get me wrong, the gentleman in the show did his job; he served his purpose in the story, and he almost grew on me. But he's not recognisable from the book. Which is upsetting. Because the gentleman is my absolute favourite character in the book.

In the book the gentleman is as brilliant as a flash of lightening. He is loud and arrogant and flippant. His moods change within seconds. Logic barely affects his thought-processes. Empathy is something that happens to other people. And he is so inadvertently funny. He's hilarious! With his complex hand-gestures, exaggerated ego, and habit of flipping from adoration to homicide in an instant, he was a delight to read.

This gentleman was nowhere to be seen in the show. And it's not a case of acting; this was a deliberate choice. But I have no idea why anyone would make it. They took a funny and rather unusual character and turned him into a stock bad-guy. The gentleman in the show isn't loud; he's quiet. He stands silently and hisses menacingly. He doesn't have any of the complex hand-gestures; in fact, he's rather still. He seems to plot and actually has the tenacity to follow things through to their logical conclusion. He rarely makes me laugh! Who is this guy? He's not the one I fell in love with in the book.

Another thing: why did they have this preoccupation in the show with the gentleman's magic working through bargaining with the people he wishes to enchant? It's another change I can't see any reason for. The gentleman doesn't bargain if the magic is of his own choosing. Bargaining would suppose that he cared what people thought! (Or rather, that he could understand that some people might not want exactly what he wants; a thought process, which I think is beyond him.) All this bargaining has the effect of forcing the blame for the enchantment upon the enchanted, which is hardly fair.

Sigh. Out of everything, what I wanted to see most in an adaptation of the book was the gentleman made real. And he just wasn't there.

***

3. The Ugly

3.1. The inadvertent racism gets its own section because it has plucked out my heart and left me feeling very confused and not a little disappointed

All the meh parts, even the gentleman, I could have put up with. I would have been disgruntled, sure, but I was ready to take a "well, you can't have it all" attitude. What I could not put up with were the changes Stephen Black's storyline. And I would go as far as to call those changes racist.

Oh, certainly, the racism wasn't intentional, but it was still there. After all, you have someone who could be called the main character of the book. Or at least the main protagonist. And if, in an adaptation, you cut his screen-time and his role to make him one of the supporting cast, while not doing the same to any of the lead white characters, I would call that pretty racist.

In the show, Stephen has no character development. Other than his interactions with the gentleman, we hardly know much about him, and we barely know much about his interactions with the gentleman either! There's nothing in the show (other than Ariyon Bakare doing a sterling job acting with what little material he's given) to make us empathise with Stephen or care about his character. Where is his personal life? Where is his work life? Where is the racism he encounters in 19th Century England? All gone.

And, in the show, they even start to show Stephen sympathising with the gentleman. He becomes, in the end, little more than the bad-guy's sidekick. Gone is the linchpin that the story revolves around. Gone is a character as important to the plot as Strange or Norrell themselves. Instead we're left with a sidekick. A side-character. Someone who gets barely as much screentime as Mr Segundus! (Bless you, Segundus; you're great and all, but I doubt anyone would argue you were one of the main characters.)

I can understand that there were only seven hours in which to fit a lengthy book and so bits must be cut out. I understand that there might not be time for the Peep O'Day Boys, and that there might not be the budget for watching wolf-hunts. But choosing which parts to cut out is important. Could they not have cut out the part with Strange's father? Could they not have cut out some of the war? Did we really need to see Strange playing pool? In moving (rich, white) Strange to the front of the story, they have sidelined (lower-class, black) Stephen Black. It is a move which is not that shocking for today's media, but it is still highly disappointing.

And to think, when we finally get to Stephen's big scene in the last episode, we have to have Strange and Norrell there to tell him how to save the day! Jesus Christ! I may have been swearing at the TV a little.

If it weren't for this, BBC adaptation, you could have been great! Instead you left a bad taste in my mouth.

***

4. Good God let's have a conclusion

So, there you have it. The adaptation was very much a game of two halves. It started out great (aside from the gentleman) and slowly left me feeling more and more disappointed. And I think part of the problem is that the bits that were good were so very good. It looked stunning! The acting was great! They paid so much attention to detail! Some parts felt as if they'd stepped straight off the page and onto the screen. And that's what makes the problematic parts, the racist parts, so galling. If they could get so much right, how could they get this so very wrong?

Ugh. I am buying the DVD anyway, because I feel obliged to as a fan of the book. And the bits that were good were so very good to watch. (And let's face it, I would pay good money to be able to watch Childermass and Segundus some more.) But I'm not buying it with the joy I thought I might have done. Besides, if I can buy three DVDs of The Hobbit, which I found actively boring in parts, then I can cope with this. Yes, I am that much of a fan.

(Come to think of it, I might buy the DVD for Wolf Hall too. I fancy a rewatch.)

But, if the show was good for anything, it was to remind me to read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell again. It remains one of the best books I've ever read; I would like to spend some more time with it.