The two central figures in a soothsayer’s grim forecast, Strange and Norrell soon find themselves entwined in London’s upper crust, forced to navigate the public’s false impression of their occult talents as frauds and hucksters desperate to pocket a few quid, and military officials who mistake “magic” for “miracle” in the making of a new strategy. Of course the campaign relies on zombie soldiers for reconnaissance! is an actual thought that crossed my mind during the most recent episode, “The Education of a Magician,” which is high praise if you ask me. Adapted by Peter Harness and directed by Toby Haynes, the universe of the seven-part miniseries is so ardently realized, with spikes of Gothic horror and modern humor, stretches of historical precision and thatches of Expressionism, that the notion of Parliament leaning on magicians to support the red coats across the Channel comes to seem almost natural. Norrell” succeeds in layering the far-fetched with the lifelike, as if Hilary Mantel had written “Harry Potter” or Lev Grossman sprinkled Jane Austen through a book of spells. Set in England at the time of the Napoleonic Wars-the transporting premiere, “The Friends of English Magic,” opens in 1806-”Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” conjures up a fleet-footed interpretation of magical realism, poised on the border between prophecies and politics. In the cold, greenish light, the diminutive sorcerer animates the structure’s stone friezes for a society of skeptics-the first magic of its sort performed in England in three centuries, and the opening salvo in BBC America’s disarming adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s 2004 novel.īy turns ghoulish, fanciful, and surprisingly funny, “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Eddie Marsan), through the water held by a silver bowl, and into the nave of an ornate church. From its vertiginous position above his head, the camera dives past hermetic, white-wigged magician Mr.

Norrell and strange