It is one of my guilty pleasures to admit that I prefer Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy to J.R.R. Tolkien’s original books. The films feel like a spectacular treat whereas I always find the novels an epic trudge. (On the other hand, and in spite of their enormous box office success, the Hobbit films seem to me bloated abominations, trampling over the short novel’s singular success). It’s become a truism that the book is always better than the film, but I argue that adaptations can improve on their originals, counting David Fincher’s Fight Club and Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys among my evidence, both of which contain metafictional commentary on their status as films.

This is not to say that Toby Haynes’ TV adaptation of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is better than Susanna Clarke’s 2004 source novel (indeed, I can imagine several of my friends shouting at me that I’m creating a false dichotomy). Both text and TV show blend period drama with fantasy in the titular gentlemen’s magical feud in a meticulously reimagined Regency England. But, as I was watching it, I wondered whether Haynes and the adaptation’s writer, Peter Harness, were deliberately staging the contrast between Gilbert Norrell’s bookishness and Mr Strange’s spectacular magic as a subtle commentary on the difference between reading books and watching television. Norrell’s magic is scholarly, exacting, respectable and dull: the rain ships he conjures to trick the French navy remain stationary optical illusions. Strange’s sorcery is visually stunning: the sequence in which he conjures sand horses to right a beached ship is a triumph for the show’s special effects team. Norrell’s magic seems to exhaust him; Strange’s, at least at first, renders him perkily virile. In an adaptation of a book about bookish men, each episode delighted in opportunities to literally explode books and explosively demonstrate the difference between Norrell’s literate magic and Strange’s more impulsive and immediate spectacle.

At this point, I ought to admit that, although I read Clarke’s novel when it was first published (in what I thought was the dim and distant past of the 1990s, but was horrified to discover was only as recently as 2004 – so long, dependable memory!), I could remember very little of it, beyond dream-like snatches here and there, and a nagging feeling of anti-climax – I remember looking forward to a sequel which never arrived. My dreamy memory of the original perversely contributed to my enjoyment of the adaptation: the increasingly nightmarish atmosphere of the episodes as they progressed was heightened by my fragmentary recollection of scenes just as they were happening. Alice Englert’s performance as the enchanted Lady Pole particularly resonated in this respect. Her emotional distress at being magically forbidden from explaining her situation, that half her life, her sleep, had been bargained away to further Norrell’s magical career, being forced instead to spout seemingly nonsensical fairy tales, underscored the cruelty of the spell’s dream logic. The character’s development from leisured consumptive through bewildered revenant to one of the series’ feminist champions was profoundly satisfying.

Indeed, the whole cast should be celebrated for their pitch perfect performances. Eddie Marsan and Bertie Carvel added layers to the conflict between Mr Norrell’s Enlightenment rationalism and Jonathan Strange’s Romantic imagination, with Marsan maintaining sympathy for Norrell’s provincial, hypocritical, desperate desire for respectability and Carvel spiriting his character from aristocratic ennui to shaken war veteran. The scene in which Norrell pleads for his pupil’s return after Strange has published a devastating review of Lascelle’s History of English Magic is quietly powerful, especially in contrast to Strange’s earlier scene in which his wife Arabella confronts his recklessness. The Stranges’ marital contretemps is witnessed by their maid and two uncomfortable soldiers; Strange’s break with Norrell unfolds in private.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell becomes increasingly interested in how controversial issues relating to gender, race and class function in private and in public. Ariyon Bakare’s nuanced performance as the Nameless Slave, also known as Steven Black, contributes to this theme. Bakare takes his character from sturdy obedience, as self-effacing servant to both English aristocrats and the fairy Gentleman (played with restrained glee by Marc Warren), to a frustrated articulation of his oppression, in a brilliant scene between him and Paul Kaye’s Vinculus, discussing their bodies as texts. Vinculus is literally inscribed by the Raven King’s book of magic which leads Black to recognize how he is marked by his skin colour into a life of undignified serfdom. The scene in which the Gentleman spells out Black’s abject position in the household of the slave-owning Poles is an astonishingly powerful exposé of race relations in the nineteenth century. The Gentleman shows Black his birth aboard a slave ship, with his mother dying before giving him a name: he is the Nameless Slave of Vinculus’s prophecy; the name ‘Stephen Black’ being given to him by the Poles who owned his mother. Black’s subplot culminates explosively in his regicide apotheosis as King of Lost Hope, realising a violent subversion of the master-slave dialectic which has ensnared him, at least in the fantasy setting of the Gentleman’s former realm.

My enjoyment of Clarke’s book was undermined by that aforementioned feeling of anti-climax. What happened to Strange and Norrell? What about the Raven King? What was the point of this long book, again? These questions were juvenile, I suppose, and maybe a marker of my then preference for popular fantasy – with all its endless sequels – over this more literary sort. However, I still found myself wondering about mission creep in some of the sequences in this adaptation. The scene in which Enzo Clienti’s Childermass pledges to support Strange if Norrell succeeds and Norrell if Strange does is electrifying, but left me wondering what both magicians were actually hoping to achieve at certain points, beyond responding to events beyond their control. In the end, I think I was frustrated by a vision of human nature – sympathetic, yes; even noble – which subordinates our endeavours to the forces of prophecy or predestination, the progress of history, or the development of magic. Strange, Norrell, Arabella, the Poles, Black, all of these complex, colourful, courageous characters, are revealed to be the mere puppets of circumstance.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell aired in the UK on BBC One between May 17th and June 28th 2015.