Jonathan Strange: Arabella

This one might be a bit of a rant, and I promise it's not just because the episode departs from the book (or at least, doesn't relate this part of the story in the same way the book does). There are also some rather dodgy additions here which don't reflect very well on the characters involved.

As I mentioned earlier, the chapters in which Arabella mysteriously disappears are among my absolute favourites of the book, and so I was inevitably going to turn a critical eye on the adaptation of them. Clarke's rendering of Arabella's disappearance and death is one of the eeriest, spookiest things I've ever read, and you'll have to just take my word for it that I don't say that very often. The only apt comparison I can think of is how I felt when I read Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None for the first time: cold and unsettled (in the best way possible).

Here? Well it was strange and creepy, but it wasn't what it could have been. It does however serve as a striking example of how the same event can unfold in two different mediums and feel profoundly different in each.  

How did all this play out in the book? In Clarke's narrative, this entire sequence is all about generating and sustaining a sense of unease and confusion. I can't stress enough that being a good writer is often not about what you say but what you hold back – in this case, a clear explanation of what's really going on. Don’t get me wrong, Clarke gives us all the information we need to infer what's happening, but she consistently refrains from spelling it out to us.

Let's unpack it a bit. In the chapter preceding Arabella's disappearance we are given a scene in which Stephen and the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair fetch a moss-oak out of a bog. The Gentleman is very pleased with this, but we are left with no idea of what it's actually for.  

The following chapter introduces us to Mr Hyde, who comes to the Strange household with a very strange story: he had left a companion's house just prior to a snowfall, taking a short but isolated route through the hills in the hope he would get home quicker. It's this very isolation which makes it so odd that he can hear a bell tolling somewhere close by.

Things get stranger: in the snow before him he can see a woman in a black dress walking away from him, and though he follows he soon loses sight of her. He knows one thing though – that the woman was Mrs Strange. At the time of the sighting he came straight to the Strange house to share this news, only to be turned away by the servants. However, he managed to ascertain for himself that Arabella was safe and sound (and in a blue dress) by peering through one of the windows.

Now, three days later he's come to share this story with Mr Strange. In the same conversation he is established to the reader as a sound witness (having known Arabella since she was a little girl and with a reputation for sobriety) as well as someone who cares deeply for her safety. Before he departs, Strange ponders one other anomaly in Hyde's tale: Arabella is recounted as wearing a black dress, which is highly uncharacteristic of her.

At this point, there's no indication whatsoever that any of this has anything to do with the moss-oak.

The chapter continues with the arrival of Henry Woodhope, Arabella's brother for the Christmas holidays. The mood in the house is tense as Jonathan and Henry don't get on particularly well, and the weather provides a claustrophobic setting considering they're almost snowed in.

And then one morning Jonathan wakes up while it's still dark to half-consciously note that Arabella has gotten out of bed and is brushing her hair at the vanity. He goes back to sleep, and when dawn breaks he goes about his morning activities, only to again be interrupted by the arrival of Mr Hyde. He's once more seen Arabella walking in the snowy countryside – and this time she's not in the house.

But Clarke's prose at this point is what's really important. Everything is relayed carefully, as though you're reading a witness testimony or a police report. We’re given specific times in which certain things happen; careful descriptions of what people see and how they behave. You can sense the narrator is trying to convey something important without actually saying what it is; there's a constant undercurrent of: are you paying attention, are you reading carefully, are you putting together what's really happening here?

Throughout the whole thing we are kept firmly out of Jonathan's head (which is unusual for this book); his reactions described but not his thoughts. If anything, the whole thing is told from the point-of-view of the search party. They comb the house and grounds, they question more witnesses (who collaborate Mr Hyde's story, although there is some confusion over the time as they too heard a bell tolling and so assumed it was nine o'clock), they ascertain what Arabella was wearing (definitely not a black dress) and they prepare homes in the vicinity in case of her return. 

Feelings eventually turn against Jonathan, who is perceived as acting abnormally in the wake of his wife's disappearance, and a few rumours start about why exactly Arabella might have left the house. He recalls waking up in the night to find her out of bed, and again the time is called into question – could it be that Arabella disappeared the night before?

It's around this time there's a commotion at the door: Arabella has returned – but inexplicably wearing a black dress. Jonathan's behaviour is further disapproved of, the servants hurry Arabella to bed when he becomes distracted by a puddle of black water on the floor filled with tiny bits of moss, and instances of her odd behaviour are recounted when she grows ill. The end of the chapter announces: "on the third day she was dead."

I remember gasping out loud when I read this for the first time. In hindsight it seems obvious that Arabella was replaced with a moss-oak doppelgänger, but the first time around it's a haunting and mysterious sequence of events that left me believing that Arabella had truly died in unfathomable circumstances. And although we later realize the significance of the moss-oak and the black dress, there are several things we never truly discover, such as how Arabella was compelled to leave the house in the first place, or how the moss-oak was formed to look just like her. It's the not knowing that makes it so spooky.

So how do things play out in the show?

Well, the writers are wise enough to keep the incident in which Mr Hyde first spots "Arabella" out in the snow, though it makes sense that they would combine his first two visits to the Strange house into one (though it breaks the Rule of Three that is prevalent throughout this chapter). Mr Hyde's honesty is established, and so is the anomaly of the black dress.

But already the audience knows that the woman out in the snow is the moss-oak. We saw the transformation at the end of the last episode. So at this point Mr Hyde's story is not a baffling enigma so much as a Chekhov's Gun waiting to go off.

And so it does, as Arabella wakes up in the middle of the night to the sound of a carriage pulling up outside her house. It's Stephen, who tells her that Lady Pole is in great distress and in need of her help. Interspersed with this are scenes of Lady Pole waking up from a dream of the carriage and hopelessly trying to warn Mr Segundus of the impending danger to Arabella, but only managing to blurt out "moss-oak."

*grumpy sigh*

There's no room in this for any strangeness or suspense. It's been robbed of its mystery thanks to the general wisdom that viewers are stupid and need to be told everything in the hopes they'll understand what's going on.

So the following morning Jonathan wakes up and is soon disturbed by Mr Hyde, once again insisting that he's sighted Arabella on the hills. The ensuing search is intercut with scenes of a frightened Arabella being carried away to Faerie before Stephen drags her by the hand into Lost Hope. Just as Jonathan starts to despair, "Arabella" appears at the door – and it's here that the adaptation drops the ball completely.

In the book the moss-oak is a perfect facsimile of Arabella. Mr Hyde swears to what he saw because the Arabella in the snow even moved like the woman he's known for all her life, and apart from a few odd comments (such as calling her feet "roots") the moss-oak effortlessly fools everyone in the house into believing she's Mrs Strange – including her husband and brother.

In the show we get this:

Zombie!Arabella.

She staggers about, she rolls her eyes, she makes weird noises – and worst of all, the show adds an exchange in which the moss-oak demands that Jonathan identify and accept her as his wife. This makes the Gentleman's claim on the real Arabella possible, as with Jonathan's words he apparently bargains her life away.

(It's ironic, as in the book the Gentleman can get away with exchanging Arabella for a doppelgänger is precisely BECAUSE Jonathan is a rather neglectful husband. In the show they've gone out of their way to make him much more openly loving and attentive – which only makes his inability to recognise an impostor all the more absurd).

Now folklore is full of these sorts of tricks, in which people are duped into agreeing to things they don't want, or finding loopholes in clumsily-worded contracts, but this...? This is essentially saying that Arabella is Jonathan's property, and by accidentally telling a piece of wood that she's his wife, she can be handed over to the Gentleman with no strings attached. Just to add an extra dose of ickiness, the Gentleman goes on to put Arabella under a spell so that she rather drunkenly joins him in a dance without any sign of free will.

Oh, and now is as good a place as any to point out that in the book Stephen was in NO WAY, SHAPE OR FORM involved in Arabella's disappearance. Here it plays out like a kidnapping in which he tricks her into the carriage with false information about Lady Pole. It's awful! Stephen is meant to be a victim, not an accomplice, and there are some rather unsettling implications in the portrayal of him driving Arabella to her doom.

NO. Just NO.

Last but not least, having at least taken the opportunity to portray Arabella's point-of-view in the matter of her own kidnapping, the entire incident still manages to be all about Jonathan – his grief, his despair. The adaptation veers sharply from the page when it comes to depicting Jonathan's denial and his attempts to bring Arabella back from the dead, whereas the book chapter ends with the pronouncement of Arabella's death before a Time Skip is utilized between one volume and the next (the novel being divided into three parts).

In short, the book makes it very clear that this is Arabella's tragedy. The chapter ends with her. Here the episode continues on long after her demise, detailing Jonathan's anguish at her loss.

To sum up, I don't think they did this part of the book justice – they did not capture the perspective from which it should have been told, the behaviour of the characters who were involved, or the suspense that was drawn out over the course of two chapters. A part of me feels this entire episode could have been devoted to the build-up of Arabella's disappearance and the panic that ensues once she's gone.

If you've never read the book before, then I hope this episode inspires you to do so - even if you're daunted by its size and are otherwise not that interested, at least read the two Arabella chapters so you know what you're missing. It's honestly one of my favourite pieces of writing of all time.

Miscellaneous Observations:

This poster had similar concerns to mine about the implications of the changes made throughout this episode.

In light of Arabella's death, it would seem that everything else about this episode is relegated to the "miscellaneous" pile, though it also heralded the beginning of the publishing war between Norrell and Strange, with Norrell's ongoing paranoia over Strange endorsing the return of the Raven King. This meeting of self-interest with the political implications of such a man's return to England was one of the more interesting topics of the book (Lord Pole doesn't look particularly happy about it either) and I wonder how non-book readers are going to react to its resolution.

The more I think about it, the more oddly I think this episode was structured. It starts with the end of the Battle of Waterloo and rather than have Arabella's death close the episode, it takes place about halfway through. And despite the episode title being Arabella, it starts with a sweeping shot of battle and Jonathan using water-bending magic to fight his enemies, culminating in the crushing of a man in a giant mud hand. There's a reason I never really liked this part of the book and it's because wars are meant to be big deals. We're used to them being at centre of any given story (in the sense that even when they occur at the climax, most of the book has been a build-up to them), and here it always felt as though the war against Napoleon was sort of shunted to the side. A bit like World War I in season two of Downton Abbey, which occurred largely off-screen.

My memory fails me again when it comes to Mr Segundus and Mr Honeyfoot recording Lady Pole's nonsense stories and realizing that they were "human tales, not fairy tales" (that is, stories told from the point-of-view of the fairies). I can't recall whether this detail was in the book, or whether it simply serves as a way of integrating the footnotes into the show - but either way, the soft sound effects that supplemented her narration was a nice touch.

As was the creaking wood and the change of lighting in the room when Jonathan performed the spell to find Arabella.

Childermass says that before he was in Norrell's service he was a pickpocket – I'm not hugely surprised by this, but again – this feels like a detail original to the adaptation. I'm sure I would have remembered reading that, but tell me if I'm wrong.

Another surprising addition was that Jonathan raises the possibility to Lord Pole that the very reason no one has questioned Norrell on Lady Pole's condition is that he's cast a spell over them. Way to plug a plot-hole!

Poor old Drawlight. I spotted him there in the jail-cell.

And so it ends with Jonathan reaching his epiphany about how he might get in contact with a fairy and escaping prison through a puddle on the floor. That's a great sentence right there. 

Now that we've hurdled my favourite bit of the book, I can hopefully get back to casually enjoying the show in the weeks to come.