Most important, it has appealing performances by Bertie Carvel as Strange and particularly by Eddie Marsan as the crabbed and proud Norrell. It moves along at a gallop, and it’s not boring, even if it’s not exactly engaging either. The changes don’t make for an unpleasant viewing experience - “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” is great to look at.

The indirect, sometimes ponderous humor of the book has been broadened and turned into punch lines, the ghost-story elements have been emphasized, and much of the budget appears to have gone into the costumes. Harness has written - crossed with one of the channel’s relatively sumptuous period dramas. Clarke merrily pilfered from Austen, Dickens and “Castle Rackrent,” the TV show settles for a style that could be called BBC Modern, one that looks like “Doctor Who” - for which Mr. They take part in historical events, such as helping to fight the Peninsular War against France, and in a somewhat labored central fantasy-romance story line, involving a malevolent fairy who takes a shine to Strange’s wife. The story, in greatly abridged form, is that actual magic was once a part of everyday life in Britain but had disappeared for several centuries until the emergence in the early 1800s of the two men of the title: Norrell, a pedantic, humorless magician obsessed with scholarship, and Strange, an unschooled natural talent who becomes Norrell’s student. Even at close to seven hours of screen time, the show, written by Peter Harness, has compressed and rejiggered the novel enormously to achieve something resembling a coherent, conventional narrative. That’s not to put down this BBC production, which makes its premiere in the United States a month after its debut in Britain, but to warn those who enjoyed the best-selling book to temper their expectations. The answer, almost inevitably, is no - asked to produce more enchantment, they’ve countered by making a largely unremarkable mini-series.

The question with regard to “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell,” a seven-part mini-series beginning Saturday night on BBC America, is whether the people involved had the magical ability to capture the spirit of the outsize (846 pages in paperback), allusive 2004 fantasy novel by Susanna Clarke on which it’s based. “Can you make them appear?” Unable to fill the general’s request, Strange offers instead to make it rain. “What I chiefly require, sir, is more artillery and more men,” he barks at Strange. When the Duke of Wellington meets Jonathan Strange, the magician sent to the Continent from England to help him defeat Napoleon, he is not impressed.

Jonathan strange and mr norrell book