Books like The Light Ages

If this book had been a movie, I can imagine that the pitch session would have gone like this: Writer: Think: Great Expectations meets Germinal! Producer: Germa-what? Writer: It's this French novel by … Producer: Nobody's gonna wanna watch a French story. What are you? Crazy?Writer: But with magic, you know, like Harry Potter! But it'll take place in the Victorian century, and instead of coal we'll have this magic called aether, and instead of coal pits, we'll have aether pits. Producer: Now, you're talkin'. Writer: So, we have this kid right, and he meets this old lady, like Miss Havisham…Producer: Does this have monsters? Kids love monsters. Writer: And Miss Havisham is a monster, cause of the aether. Only she doesn't look like one. Producer: And it's gotta have sex too. Writer: Well, this Miss Havisham character brings up this little girl, Annalise, who's also a monster. But pretty. Producer: Awww, no monster sex. That's way too weird. Writer: But then, even though the kid falls in love with her, she wants nothing to do with him, see. Just like Great Expectations.Producer: Okay, I think we can sell that. Star-crossed lovers! Boy loves girl monster! Any violence? We gonna need some violence. Writer: Yeah, that's where the Germi…errr…yeah, there're going to be riots cause the people are fed up of being crushed by the rich. And the boy will grow up to be this radical revolutionary. And there'll be this big scene where this bell-tower comes crashing down. And lots of fire and explosions. And dragons! And unicorns! Just like Harry Potter! Producer: Oh excellent! Gimme a script tomorrow! The sad thing is that there are some great scenes: Robbie's mother slowly turning into a troll due to overexposure to aether, the ball when Robbie meets Annalise for the first time as an adult, the bell-tower crashing down on Robbie and Annalise… For these, I give it three stars. But not more than three. Because these individual scenes don't gel into a compelling enough vision of an aetherised England. It's not enough to just write a story about the Victorian age, and then instead of "coal" write "aether" and instead of "coal pits" write "aether pits", and pretty much leave everything else the same. When Susanna Clarke wrote Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, she had it set in 1800's England at war with Napoleonic France. The rendering of the culture and society was sufficiently similar to be recognizable. But the magic was woven in with such loving detail that it made that world subtly, weirdly, magically and compellingly different. This is not what happens here: yes, this is an age powered by some exotic-sounding type substance but of that substance, of that magic, little more than a slapped-on name and some superficial descriptions of shimmering threads. So, you see, that's pretty much the problem. You can take the idea of an age powered by magic, you can take ideas from history, but ultimately it still has to fuse together into a living, breathing whole. Otherwise, all it is is an Aetherpiltdown Man: an awkward dead construction cobbled together unconvincingly from various disparate parts.