Today, we’re thrilled to welcome Shaun Hamill back to the Hive.

Shaun joins us today to explore how two of his favourite authors, Susanna Clarke and Lev Grossman write magic, and how they influenced his own writing. Before we check out his article, let’s find out a little more about Shaun’s own book, The Dissonance:

Four teenagers are thrust into a life of magic, secrecy and sacrifice in this captivating dark fantasy, perfect for fans of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower and The Shadow Glass by Josh Winning

It starts as an end-of-junior-school sleepover, but when Athena, Hal, Peter and Erin stumble across a missing boy, deep in the forests surrounding sleepy Clegg, Texas, they discover a world of sorcery and untold power. So begins a new life with the Dissonance, under the tutelage of Professor Elijah Marsh.

Twenty years later, separated and broken by their experiences, the friends are pulled back to Clegg for the anniversary memorial service at the town’s high school. Each carrying their own trauma, they come together once more to confront the legacy of their actions, and the monsters they failed to bury.

Hurled onto a collision course with the apocalyptic events of their past, Owen, a young man trapped in service to a murderous entity, and several lifetimes of mistakes, three unsuccessful adults and one frightened teen are all that stand between reality and oblivion.

The Dissonance is due for publication from Titan on 23rd July 2024. You can order your copy from:

Titan Books | Bookshop.org | Waterstones

Wild Magic

Four Lessons I Learned From Susanna Clarke & Lev Grossman While Writing The Dissonance

By Shaun Hamill

I’ll be honest: this is a sales pitch. I’m here to promote the release of my second novel, The Dissonance. It’s a dark fantasy (bordering on horror), which hits on 7/23/24. It’s a coming-of-age story about the cost of magic and the importance of human connection. I’m desperate to get you to read it! But I’m gonna try and play it cool. So instead of trying to sell you on the virtues of my book, I’m going to spend a little time blabbing about two of my all-time, top five favorite books: Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and Lev Grossman’s The Magicians*. 

I’ve always been fascinated by both novels’ portrayal of the study (and practice) of magic, and I thought it might be fun to talk about four lessons I learned and tried to deploy when writing The Dissonance. Most of what follows will be about Clarke and Grossman, but hopefully it’ll whet your appetite for my book too? If not, at least I got to spend time talking about stuff I love. Win-win, really.

(Warning: I am going to spoil the shit out of both Grossman and Clarke’s novels, while studiously avoiding spoilers for The Dissonance). 

* I love Grossman’s entire trilogy, but we’re pressed for space, so I’m going to stick to the original here.

• Lesson #1: Not Everyone Can Do It

Let’s start with the most obvious one. It’s part of the romance of the magician/wizard archetype, right? In most fantasy literature, the ability to perform magic is based on an accident of genetics/destiny/talent/what-have-you. It’s no different from being tall, autistic, or naturally good-looking or gifted at singing. It’s something you either have, or don’t. 

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell opens with a meeting of a group of “gentlemen magicians” in York, men who meet once a month to “read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.” And yet, not a single one of these men actually practices magic. They seem to think themselves above it, but in truth, they simply don’t have the knack. There hasn’t been a practicing magician in England for many years, and it’s not until a couple of these academics meet the titular Mr Norrell, a self-proclaimed “tolerable practical magician,” that magic actually starts to creep back into the world of the novel.

Early in The Magicians, protagonist Quentin Coldwater stumbles out of his boring life in Brooklyn and onto the lawn of Brakebills University of Magical Pedagogy. Quentin arrives with a score of other potential students, but over the course of an excruciating entrance exam, most of those other potentials flunk out, and Quentin himself is guided (berated, really) into performing his first true act of magic, pulling a sword from a desk. This demonstration earns him a spot—one of only 20—at the school. 

Mr Norrell, Quentin (and Jonathan Strange, about whom we’ll talk more in a moment) have the knack. 

This is the most obvious thing I stole for The Dissonance. Magic is a talent. But I added a small twist in my book—what if the only broken people had the knack? The ones with mental illness, trauma, and the like? What if my heroes had to suffer in order to perform miracles?

This leads us to…

• Lesson #2: Magic Is Also a Discipline

Who doesn’t love the idea of magic as a talent? How many of us (especially us bookish nerds) walked through our entire young lives hoping that we were different or special in some secret way? That we would stumble onto a destiny, or purpose? To find out we matter in a way we never suspected? It’s the ultimate fantasy.

But in the worlds of Clarke and Grossman’s novels, talent is not enough. Even naturally gifted individuals have to work their asses off to get good**. After all, everyone at Quentin’s Brakebills Entrance Exam is a potential student. They all have the knack. But at the end of the test, all but two of these potentials are sent home, and Quentin, who has passed the admission, has to hit the books immediately. 

In the first half of The Magicians, Grossman gets deep into the nitty-gritty of the coursework at a magical university. We learn about how difficult magic is, and the insane amount of knowledge and practice it requires. Quentin might be smart and talented, but he has to study like any overworked STEM undergrad. He fails often, and that makes his successes that much more… well, magical. 

Clarke employs a lighter touch when depicting a magical education. Readers are treated to book titles and authors aplenty (to say nothing of the ocean of delightful worldbuilding footnotes). The reader comes to understand the rarity and importance of magical knowledge—that most of it is in books, and that those books are hard to find. But despite this (very cool) emphasis on the importance of literature, we see less of the specifics, the aforementioned nitty-gritty. We understand that Gilbert Norrell has spent most of his life studying magic, and even Jonathan Strange, who is more obviously gifted magic user, has to study hard. Clarke rides a fine line—she keeps magic mysterious, but also gives the reader the impression of all the hard work it takes to master it.

The Dissonance is no different, in this respect. My young protagonists spend their summer vacations every year training under the demanding, mercurial Professor Marsh. Knowledge is precious and he’s their only source of enlightenment, so most of them bust their asses trying to keep the old man happy, so they can, in turn, grow more powerful.

**I know Grossman and Clarke aren’t the first or only writers to employ the “magician/wizard as student” archetype. They didn’t invent it. But they both use it well and were big influences on me!

• Lesson #3: Magic Won’t Make You Happy

This lesson is vital to me, even though it may seem obvious, too. After all, what usually happens to a young wizard-in-training? They get into adventures, have to solve problems, and so on. They go through the gauntlet. But I think this lesson goes deeper than explosive external conflicts. Much deeper.

When we meet Quentin Coldwater in The Magicians, he’s daydreaming about Fillory and Further, a series of children’s fantasy novels. He longs for magic to be real. The novel grants his wish almost immediately, and goes a step further: not only is magic real, but Quentin is one of the rare individuals with the capacity to perform it.

The Magicians asks the question: What happens after you get your alleged deepest desire? 

Life remains tough for Quentin. His career at Brakebills is a series of ups and downs, triumphs and defeats. He grinds away at his studies, perpetually overwhelmed, never the best or worst in his class. He makes good friends, and even falls in love. All of that is good, but then comes graduation, and Quentin’s life as an adult, and that’s where things get really murky.

Quentin’s friends and teachers warn him about life after college. They suggest he find a purpose. But he doesn’t. Without the compass of academia, and with magic to satisfy his every need or whim, Quentin flounders. He slips into ennui and heavy drinking, and then, one night, feeling numb, he cheats on his girlfriend, Alice, and ruins their relationship. Even in the back of the novel, when Quentin learns that his beloved Fillory is real, the reality turns out to be a disappointment. At this point, we start to understand who Quentin really is: a privileged, self-absorbed, self-pitying little shit, whose heart’s desire was never actually magic. In truth, Quentin has only ever desired escape. Escape from Brooklyn wasn’t enough. He wants to escape himself (the one magic trick none of us can truly perform in this life).

In Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, on the other hand, there never seems to be a question of whether or not magic will make the user happy. Gilbert Norrell is a stuffy little man who doesn’t seem to enjoy his existence much at all, aside from the study of magic. His protégé, Jonathan Strange, by contrast, is a vibrant, and likable person. Like Norrell, he hyper fixates on the study of magic, but the love he shares with his wife, Arabella, keeps him grounded in this world. When, later in the novel, Strange loses Arabella, he is completely unmoored. Despite the book’s arch, dry, British tone, Clarke makes it clear: human connection is the key to happiness†. 

I feel like this lesson is tied to lesson one, at least when it comes to The Dissonance. After all, it’s a prerequisite in the novel—you can’t perform magic if you’re a happy, whole human being. Magic is born out of the friction at the heart of creation, the gap between how things ought to be, and how they actually are. So of course that spills into my heroes’ personal lives as well. Their continual levelling up makes their lives more interesting, but not happier. For that, they have to look to one another, and, like any group of teenagers, they fail as often as they succeed. 

† For more proof, look to Norrell’s relationship with Strange. While initially suspicious, and a bit jealous, he warms to Strange’s company and seems delighted, at the end of the novel, when they are reunited after a time as enemies. Even the bibliophile island Gilbert Norrell needs other people in his life.

• Lesson #4: Magic is Dangerous, Wild, and Untameable

Now we come to the most important lesson, the one that I think both Clarke and Grossman teach with aplomb. As we’ve previously established, magic is both talent and discipline in the novels under discussion, but despite the accumulated knowledge imparted to Quentin, Strange, and Norrell, magic remains essentially mysterious. In other words, the practitioners know it works, but they don’t really know why or how, and looking too closely is a sure path to madness or failure. As Brakebills’s Dean Fogg tells Quentin, “It’s turtles all the way down.”

Quentin gets his first taste of the mystery in his first year at Brakebills. Bored during a class, he tries to prank the professor by using magic to shake the podium at the front of the room. This causes the professor to misspeak a spell, and allows a creature known as “the Beast” to invade the school. The Beast, a small man in a gray suit who has a leafy branch obscuring his face, freezes everyone in the room, and then eats one of Quentin’s classmates alive before disappearing back into the ether. 

Later in the novel, during a climactic battle, Quentin gets another, far more bitter taste of the mystery. His beloved Alice (whom he still adores, despite his fuckups) marshals an insane amount of energy to stop the Beast, and she’s consumed by magic, sacrificing herself. In the immediate aftermath, Quentin does everything he can think of to bring Alice back, but nothing seems to work. He’s stuck with magic as it is—not a simple wishing power, but a great, powerful, unknowable thing that he can never fully understand or control‡.  

In the early pages of Jonathan Strange, Gilbert Norrell faces a dilemma. He’s desperate to restore magic to its place of prestige in England, but none of the politicians or people in power will take him seriously. He’s a popular dinner guest in London, but not respected. This changes when a young woman named Emma Wintertowne falls ill. Wintertowne is engaged to an influential politician named Sir Walter Pole. Desperate to save his would-be bride (and the financial security their marriage will provide him), Pole calls on Norrell. 

When Norrell arrives at Pole’s residence, Wintertowne is already dead. Norrell understands that this is a crucial moment for English magic. If he wants to be admitted to the halls of power, where he can make a difference, he cannot disappoint Sir Walter. So he does something he knows is dangerous and stupid: he summons a fairy—a “gentleman with thistle-down hair”—for help. The gentleman offers Norrell a deal: Ms Wintertowne will be resurrected, but in return, the “gentleman” will claim half her life. Norrell considers this offer, and accepts. It means he’ll get what he wants, and anyway, half a life for Ms Wintertowne is better than no life at all, right?

With this choice, Norrell has made a grave error. The “gentleman,” now interested in London and the people in it, can’t seem to stop interfering. He makes the life of Ms Wintertowne (who marries and becomes Lady Pole) a living hell. He destroys the sanity of Walter’s servant, Stephen Black, and, later in the book, tricks Jonathan Strange into believing his wife, Arabella, has died.

It’s not until Strange pushes the boundaries of known magic that he is able to visit the fairy realm, and finds that the “gentleman” has abducted and imprisoned Arabella in his gloomy kingdom. Strange tries to free his wife, but the “gentleman” curses Strange with impenetrable darkness. When Strange returns to our world, he appears to others to be going insane. His behavior and correspondence seem irrational. He seems to have lost his grip on reality.

Even at the end of the novel, when the “gentleman” is defeated, when Strange is vindicated, when Arabella and Lady Pole are freed from their suffering, Strange remains trapped in the pillar of impenetrable darkness (joined by Norrell now, through a series of events you’ll have to read to believe). He and Arabella are still parted. They don’t quite understand what’s happened to them, or how to fix it.

The mystery only ever deepens. It’s “turtles all the way down.”

I wanted to capture this same sense in The Dissonance. When my coven of magic users first discovers their powers, they use them to play a party game that nearly gets them killed. Early in the novel, a character attends a necromancy ritual that goes wrong, and unleashes an apocalyptic evil into our world. One character, attempting to cure chronic grief and loneliness, breaks the foundation of existence. I wanted to give the impression that my characters were always playing with something they could never truly understand, and grappling with consequences they could never anticipate. Hopefully I managed to get at least 1/10 of what Grossman and Clarke make look so easy. 

‡ Grossman fans will point out here that both Quentin’s understanding of magic and the saga of Alice continue through the rest of the trilogy, and that’s fair! But I love how mysterious and painful the ending of the first book is.

Conclusion

I could go on for endless pages about the merits of Clarke and Grossman as novelists and the richness of their worlds and characters. I actually have—what you’re reading represents a heavily edited version of my first draft. But I’ve done my best to narrow down four things I stole or borrowed for my The Dissonance. These were my north stars, my guiding lights. They helped me shape a world, and the people who populate it. 

If, like me, you’re drawn to the wild side of magic, and the people who can’t resist its dark allure, I hope you’ll check The Dissonance. It was written with you—exactly you—in mind.

The Dissonance is due for publication from Titan on 23rd July 2024. You can order your copy from:

Titan Books | Bookshop.org | Waterstones