Catalysts
Does anyone have any brilliant examples of my topic of Childermass and Vinculus as catalysts for the book on the tip of their tongue that you could share, please? Wow, if nothing else, you should be proud of how well I butchered that sentence. I am sadly very proud of that.
posted by Keith Weber at 5:52 PM
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Look first at the scenes that include both Childermass and Vinculus. What do they both seem to know, that the other characters, even the title characters, don't seem to know? As Henry Farrell puts it in his online essay: "As the vagabond prophet Vinculus tells Childermass, the magicians aren’t so much actors as acted through, less the spellcasters than the spell itself; Vinculus himself, as his name suggests, is one of the chains that binds the two magicians to their allotted task. The magicians fail in their task, as they’re supposed to – the future of Clarke’s England belongs to other people than them."
Farrell also quotes from Clarek's description of Childermass' eventual epiphany: "In his weakened state, Childermass had been thinking aloud. He had meant to say that if what he had seen was true, then everything that Strange and Norrell had ever done was child’s-play, and magic was a much stranger and more terrifying thing than any of them had thought of. Strange and Norrell had been merely throwing paper darts about a parlour, while real magic soared and swooped and twisted on great wings in a limitless sky far, far above them."
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