nefertiti22002blog:
Another interview with Ms Clarke, prophetically enough, on the BBC’s website on Sep 24, 2004, just before the publication of JS&MN. She was asked whether Strange, the Raven King and Mr Norrell were modelled after historical figures. Her reply:
Not really. Their antecedents are mostly literary. Strange has a touch of Byron in him, I suppose, and a little of the eighteenth-century rakes—Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses and so forth. I wanted him to have a little wickedness in him—or the potential for wickedness, at any rate.
The Raven King had an odd genesis. Ursula Le Guin has a magician in the Earthsea trilogy who has no name: the Grey Mage of Plan, whose magic was so dubious, his name was forgotten. And there’s a magician in The Lord of the Rings, right at the very end, who comes out of Mordor to do battle against our heroes, and no one knows his name because he himself has forgotten it. I thought this was rather cool, and when I was developing my magicians, I wanted one without a name. Unfortunately I hadn’t quite understood what would happen if I had a major character without a name. The consequence has been that he has acquired more names than most people: the Raven King, John Uskglass, the Black King, the King of the North and a fairy name that no one can pronounce.
Mr. Norrell is more difficult. The only person I can think of that he might be based on is me. We share the same hobbies: staying at home, surrounded by books and not answering the phone. I think I got him originally from a jigsaw puzzle. It was a really great jigsaw with a picture of a huge library and two or three old gentlemen with eighteenth-century wigs reading books. I carried the image of that library around in my head for years until I knew what to do with it.
I love the idea that Mr Norrell doesn’t answer his phone. Of course, he wouldn’t! He would have caller ID and/or Childermass to screen calls.
Check out the interview here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nottingham/content/articles/2004/09/15/entertainment_books_susanna_clarke_feature.shtml
