Too Much Cholera, Not Enough Magical Realism

After being stuck in a k-hole with it for weeks, I've finally managed to get to the end of Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and sadly I'm not overly impressed. I got into that horror zone where it becomes a chore to get through a book, when you stop being excited about having the opportunity to read and it begins to feel like work. I thought Marquez was the South American version of Gunter Grass or Salman Rushdie in the Magical Realism stakes, and that was exactly what I wanted to read, but it turns out that Cholera barely has any magic in it at all, and is instead a very loooong reflection on love and ageing. Well, it's only 4oo-odd pages, but it felt a hell of a lot longer to me. It's not a bad book, and the first fifty and last fifty pages are very good, but I just didn't find it that gripping, and because I was expecting Magical Realism I was very disappointed. Maybe I should read One Hundred Years of Solitude instead, that's meant to be a more magical one.

It's got me interested in the idea of British Magical Realism, but I don't know if any novels exist. Would it even be possible to have a UK novel in the style, or to get British people to enjoy a home-set one? For me, a lot of the joy in the style is in the exotic settings of the books, usually in societies tinged with mysticism (for someone born in the UK) that accentuate the fantastical qualities. Would a book like this set in the all-too-familiar setting of little England work? I suppose it would: the British isles is swarming with fairies and witches and history that could spill into an everyday British tale and magic it up, it's just hard to imagine it striking a chord in the same way that a trawl through the history of newly-independent India can.