![]() “I thought, it doesn’t have hundreds of characters and it won’t require a huge amount of research because I don’t know what research I could do for it.” With “the consciousness of all the years that I hadn’t written and all the projects I hadn’t completed” weighing on her, Clarke decided “to simplify what I was asking of myself”, returning to an old work in progress that was to become Piranesi (“it probably predates JS&MrN”) as a more manageable prospect. I’d felt ‘I’m not an author, I’m just this invalid and I have been for years,’ but they treated me as an author and that made me feel it was a possible thing again.” “I was really uncertain about going, I thought it would be too much for me, but I loved it. It’s almost like a forest now.”Īn invitation to the set of the miniseries in Yorkshire helped to clear the path. That’s the state that the sequel to Jonathan Strange is in. Everything became like uncontained bushes, shooting out in all directions. I found it impossible to decide between one version of a sentence and another version, but also between having the plot go in this direction and having it go in that direction. “I think it may be a feature with chronic fatigue that you become incapable of making decisions. Writing became torturous – “all the projects I’ve tried to work on while I was ill kept flowing down a lot of alleys, that was part of the illness” – and the JS&MrN sequel is still “a long way off” completion. It’s hard to remember an illness because it’s just a lot of nothing. And then in the spring of 2005 I collapsed, and that was the beginning of it. “I was doing a lot of travelling and promoting and getting on and off aeroplanes – the sort of thing I’d never done before. Only months after the publication of her debut, Clarke became ill with what was eventually diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome. What Piranesi is not is the longed-for sequel to JS&MrN. As Clarke says, “You start with an image or the fragment of a story, something that feels like it has very deep roots into the unconscious, like it is going to connect up with a lot of things.” He writes in his journal that “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable its Kindness infinite.” The novel is visually atmospheric, existentially provoking and profoundly haunting. He is alone but for flocks of birds and the mysterious Other (in one of many drily funny touches that puncture any prog-rock grandiosity, the two meet up “on Tuesdays and Thursdays”). He explores its immense and endless Halls, lined with massive Statuary in the lower storeys, the Tide rises and falls, while Clouds float through the upper realms. “When I finished it I thought: ‘This is so different, I don’t know whether anyone is going to understand it because it’s so peculiar.’” ![]() The long-awaited followup is out this week and, as Clarke admits from her home in Derbyshire, it’s stranger still. Neil Gaiman, an early champion, declared it the finest work of English fantasy in 70 years – but he also predicted that it “would be too unusual and strange for the general public”. It went on to sell four million copies worldwide and was adapted for a BBC miniseries in 2015. The pages crawl with footnotes, one of the title characters doesn’t appear for the first 200 pages and at the end the reader is left hanging. The prose style mashes together Jane Austen and Charles Dickens for a tale that ranges across all levels of society as well as to fairyland and the battlefields of the Napoleonic war. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is an unlikely story of intellectual obsession, set in a Regency England in which the buried powers of English magic are reawoken by two scholar magicians. Sixteen years ago, Susanna Clarke’s debut novel became a publishing phenomenon.
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