What if magic were real? It’s not a question every fantasy novel asks – many are wholly imaginary, set in worlds no one has heard of. Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” (Bloomsbury, 800 pages, $27.95) takes place in early 19th century England. Her characters share the company of Lord Byron and the Duke of Wellington. And her novel asks a very practical question about magic: How would public relations work? This premise is not as tedious as it sounds.

“Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” has been marketed as a stunning addition to the tradition that includes J.R.R. Tolkien. In reality, it owes more to the Harry Potter series. Both pit the world of magic against the modern world; in the Potter series, the world of magic is both more serious and more exciting than the real world; the Potter books’ greatest gift to the English language is the word “muggle,” meaning an ordinary person. The Potter books offer a fulfilling escape from the suburban landscape.

But Clarke’s book offers no escape. It has the disadvantage of being historical fiction; every sentence is written in a cloying English-ese where everything is a pity, or scarcely a trifle, where you don’t show Miss Wintertowne the sofa but shewe her the sopha. Ms. Clarke’s book is jealous not of magical realms but of the putatively droll drawing rooms of the Georgian age, where even magicians speak in a dialect of mannered astonishment: “Mr. Norrell, do not be fanciful, I beg you!”

Mr. Norrell, the bookish magician who aspires to “bring back magic to England,” advocates a highly regulated modern magic. “Modern,” in Mr. Norrell’s usage, means any magic based on book-learning that is not black magic. Strange is the archetypal pupil who is so talented that he cannot resist meddling with the dark side. He does get burned, but his struggles are not as morally serious as those of even Anakin Skywalker.

For Ms. Clarke, the dark side means faeries. Norrell forbids Strange to summon a faery helper, although he has secretly done so already himself, at great peril to the welfare of all concerned. The resolution of the novel depends on the exposure of a smear campaign initiated by Norrell, whose sins are made to resemble not those of an evil wizard but of a frightened politician. It is perhaps in this sense that this novel’s magic is modern.

“Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” is curiously paced. It moves so fast that it seems to contain the treatments for a blockbuster movie and several sequels, but at its end Ms. Clarke puts on the brakes. Characters due a comeuppance are spared, the duel between Strange and Norrell becomes a collaboration against a foe who never appears.

Ms. Clarke’s sorcery is not occasional, doled out with the regal discretion of Tolkien, for whom accidentally touching a magic orb or ring can be extremely painful and corrupting. It is, in fact, mundane. Strange makes his most dramatic discoveries after he concocts liquid insanity, a few drops of which allow him to make magical connections as never before. The conventions of myth would beg that Strange would suffer some permanent perversion from his mad droplets – black magic for sure – but he does not.

Ms. Clarke was an editor at Simon & Schuster in England for most of the time she worked on this book; it is no surprise it frequently seems like it is an exercise in publishing.

– Benjamin Lytal

Peter Collier and David Horowitz have done the impossible. They’ve made it possible to feel sorry for Noam Chomsky. It’s sad to see someone so publicly dismantled, fact by damning fact. But after reading “The Anti-Chomsky Reader” (Encounter Books, 260 pages, $17.95), a new collection of essays edited by Messrs. Collier and Horowitz, perhaps the dominant emotion is confusion.

One is not only stupefied by the disingenuousness of the linguistics professor from MIT, but unsure as to what exactly he is. Socialist? Nazi sympathizer? Language scholar who abuses words to serve an agenda? How about all of the above. The assembled writers seemed to have chased down every possible escape hatch for Chomsky defenders – and they are legion – and slam them shut.

Steven Morris microwaves Mr. Chomsky’s defense of totalitarian regimes like the Khmer Rouge, whose genocide of over a million people Chomsky called “the result of localized peasant revenge and the acts of undisciplined troops.” Thomas M. Nichols notes in “Chomsky and the Cold War” that Mr. Chomsky called communist Vietnam “a miracle of reconciliation and restraint” and Maoist China “quite admirable.” Chomsky has also attacked Israel as illegitimate and defended PLO terrorists, as Paul Bogdanor observes; perhaps more infamously, he has collaborated with neo-Nazis, as shown in Werner Cohn’s “Chomsky and Holocaust Denial.”

For me the most satisfying part of the book is that two writers – David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh – finally take on what is perhaps the most annoying thing about Chomsky: the way he speaks. It is language spoken with a constant sigh. Words seem to slide out of the man’s mouth like olive oil over water. He never raises his voice, and his slow, steady, and cocksure delivery is filled with a spuriously sad resignation: I don’t make up these horrible things about the United States, and I really hate even to bring them up because it makes me so depressed. But here are the facts.

On October 18, 2001, when America began its response to 9/11 by going into Afghanistan, Mr. Chomsky claimed that America was trying to starve Afghanies by stopping food-supply trucks. At a lecture, he said, “Looks like what’s happening is some sort of silent genocide.” Spoken with the Chomsky slither, this can sink into listeners without them even thinking about it. “The casual tone and the faux professorial caution in formulating the claim,” write Messrs. Horowitz and Radosh, “are meant to disarm his listeners as they absorb the charge – which is actually quite lurid and also quite lunatic.”

Here is Chomsky on September 12, 2001: “The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan with not credible pretext.” Mr. Horowitz: “Observe the syntax: The opening reference to the actual attacks is clipped and bloodless, a kind of rhetorical throat clearing for Chomsky to get out of the way so he can announce the real subject of his concern: America’s evil. The accusation against Clinton is slipped into the text, weasel fashion, as though it were a modifier, when it is actually the theme itself.”

If there were any sense in this world, “The Anti-Chomsky Reader” would be distributed to college freshman along with the free condoms.

– Mark Gauvreau Judge