Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, the Genesis volume of Narnia. The opening epigraph to Piranesi comes from C.S. Instead it reflects a kind of density, as though Clarke has poured an enormous amount of thought and emotion into this book, and then tamped it deliberately down until everything fits. But its small scale doesn’t reflect a lack of anything to say. It clocks in at just over 200 pages, and it doesn’t have any footnotes. Piranesi is a more compact book than its predecessor. The main character of Piranesi lives his life in a state of terrible, radiant innocence It establishes Clarke not just as one of the great fantasy novelists of her generation, but as one of the greatest novelists of any genre currently writing in English. And she’s making her reentry with a new book.Ĭlarke’s new novel is called Piranesi, and it is haunting. After spending the past 15 years grappling on and off with a debilitating and undiagnosed illness, she’s at last recovered enough of herself to walk through the world again.
This week, Clarke has emerged from her long confinement. She was like Jonathan Strange’s Lady Poole, doomed to spend half her life in Faerie and the other half in waking torment. So when Clarke stopped appearing in public, it was as though she had fallen under one of her own enchantments.
She seemed to be on the precipice of a monumental career. That book established Clarke, then 44 years old and working as a cookbook editor, as one of the great fantasy novelists of her generation.
Neil Gaiman declared himself a fan and started comparing Clarke to Shakespeare. Norrell is the only book ever to have been both long-listed for literary fiction’s Mann Booker Prize and win fantasy’s Hugo Award. A reader’s report that Clarke’s publisher commissioned before acquiring the book and then distributed widely afterward began with the reader declaring they were waiving their usual fee because they had enjoyed reading the book so much. It is substantial, both in length and in ideas, and also enormously fun to read. Norrell is a big, sprawling, mythical book, a Victorian pastiche full of footnotes and arch Austenian wit in which ancient magics keep seeping in through the margins. Norrell, in the kind of massive, culture-shaking event most novelists dream of. In 2004, Susanna Clarke published her first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr.
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