BRITISH BRITISH BRITISH. Between Peep Show and Black Mirror, all I've been watching on Netflix the past few weeks are British people being British, and now here come some more British people, ready to British it up.

THE DIFFERENCE is that these British people ("Brits") are from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, the 2004 (British) fantasy novel by Susanna Clarke, which got a whole lot of "It's like Harry Potter, but for adults!" when it came out, which couldn't have been further from the truth. Post-Rowling, this seems to be unavoidable when it comes to fantasy books for adults; as with Patrick Rothfuss' The Kingkiller Chronicle and Lev Grossman's The Magicians, "It's like Harry Potter, but for adults!" is a stupid phrase that's going to keep getting attached to books regardless of inaccuracy. What Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell IS, though, is stuffy and old-timey literary, and it's also long. While I remember enjoying it when I read it 10 years ago, I don't actually recall a tremendous amount about it, other than a really great library, some crows, and a remarkable tone. Sometimes in fantasy, a great tone can be enough to carry you through a whole book. And Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell's tone—restrained but ominous, with the sense that magic was about to tear apart the carefully stitched-together lives of its characters—was great. Or maybe I'm remembering it all wrong. It's been 10 years, and I've watched a lot of Peep Show since then.

Regardless, the BBC's long-awaited miniseries adaptation of Clarke's book is finally coming out next year to refresh everybody's memories, and it stars the great Eddie Marsan as Mr Norrell. Here's a ridiculously short clip of Marsan being all Mr Norrellish. I will probably watch this show. I should probably reread the book before then.

(Via Meredith Borders at Badass Digest.)