In this space, at irregular intervals, the Wombat File staff report on (relatively) new and forthcoming books which offer evidence that reading pleasure, despite its reported decline in cultural prominence, can still occasionally be spotted, stalked, dispatched, stuffed, and mounted. No attempt shall be made to analyze those volumes which disappoint, nor to catalogue those which meet dismally low expectations. Don't get us wrong: this isn't the Believer. But our reserves of bile, spleen, venom, and acid wit are just barely big enough to handle the demands government and television place on them. Therefore, the Hi-Kwlaity Literature Report will stick to recommendations; as for the torching of the chaff -- last time I checked Michiko was still on the job.

So, to start, one that's out now, and one coming soon.

*Colm Tóibín, The Master

It's probably a little redundant to give Colm Tóibín a glowing review, since The Master looks to be picking up praise everywhere, and anyway I'm more or less abashed that I never even thought about reading Blackwater Lightship. But I'll go ahead: this is a damned fine and satisfying read, the more so for offering up a completely convincing Henry James as the closely observed main character -- without ever diving into a pastiche of any of the well-know variations on James's famously refined prose style. The Master, which loosely follows the events of the author's middle years, is essentially a character study, an attempt to inhabit and illuminate a consciousness that has remained aloof from his devoted readers. Partially concerned with the question of James's tightly controlled passions (there is a great set piece in bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes) and partially with the intricate structure of the fragile relationships James constructed with family and friends, there is no plot save the imagined movement of waves of memory self-knowledge through James's mind, as life takes him from partial engagement with the world to protective (and creative) seclusion, and then back.

But there is no lack of suspense and drama, as the emotional veiling and unveiling Henry performs generates both tension and fascination. Daniel Mendelsohn's essay in the NYT Sunday Book Review criticized Tóibín for being unable to solve the problem of understanding a man who might have been happy valuing art over more ephemeral relationships. In the end he wonders if the Toibin could truly have sympathy for such a hero of disengagement. The Master didn't read to me that way: the haunting, haunted, deeply likable Henry he creates is no cold fish. And there is something about Tóibín's prose style -- spare, precise, both direct and reticent, perfectly modulated -- that makes simply reading along such a pleasure that affection for this version of Henry James comes naturally. He's a pleasure to spend time with, and that is perhaps this book's greatest acheivement.

*Susannah Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

You heard it here first. There's going to be a significant amount of press generated with the September release of this fantasy novel, and with good reason. Clarke's 800-page whimsy is set in Regency England (for those of you who don't read much 19th century lit or, alternatively, paperback romance novels, the Regency is the era of Jane Austen, Waterloo, and represents the last hurrah for men who wore wigs), and it concerns the rediscovery or resurgence of magic in England, after its retreat into theoretical academic study for several hundred years.

I won't bother trying to summarize the plot, which is complex and appropriately wandering, but advanced at every turn with a light step and a sense of brio, so that the story seems much shorter than it is. The real feat Clarke pulls off is the absolutely convincing re-imagining of an English history in which fairy tales -- the slightly sinister, fascinating kind, like the kind that Yeats draws upon, in which a hidden world of powerful, often malevolent, sometimes helpful beings intersects with our own -- have the same weight as the Battle of Agincourt or the signing of the Magna Carta. Much revolves around the person of the Raven King, an early-medieval ruler of the northern half of England, whose reign of four hundred years is both a mythic golden age and also a modern Empire's irrational, repressed self, that must inevitably and violently return.

Clarke's drive toward the epic and tragic (which she shares with many fantasists, including Pullman) is perfectly checked by her choice of setting (the spirit of the Regency, which privileged careful social control and rationality, as well as verbal wit, kept the Gothic as its well-regulated nightmare), her natural humor (only the foolish in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell take themselves very seriously), and her love of the footnote. It's the latter that makes the novel particularly zesty -- in the footnotes Clarke can append every conversation about magical history with an engrossing tale of how a Golden Age magician found himself on a fairy road, and what happened. Multiple possible endings to these mini-stories (they are presented as a scholar's research into uncertainly recorded history) complicate one's reading of the main story. Clarke understands that the most important special effects a magician can employ are those which don't so much dazzle as hypnotize. By the time one realizes how cleverly this labyrinthine, many-faceted book is constructed, one is effectively caught, like Merlin in the cave. In this case, though, it's because one never wants to leave.

Next time: Arthur Phillips's The Egyptologist