Writing a book is like moving into an imaginary house. The author, the sole inhabitant, wanders from room to room, choosing the furnishings, correcting imperfections, adding new wings. Often, this space feels like a sanctuary. But sometimes it is a ramshackle fixer-upper that consumes time rather than cash, or a claustrophobic haunted mansion whose intractable problems nearly drive its creator mad. No one else can truly enter this house until the book is launched into the world, and once the work is completed the author becomes a kind of exile: the experience of living there can only be remembered.
Certain books, particularly novels, invite many readers to inhabit their realms over and over again, and Susanna Clarke’s début, “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,” published in 2004, is one of those. The novel, set in an alternative version of England during the Regency period, describes the partnership between two magicians and how it degenerates into rivalry. Executed in an exquisite pastiche of the precise, ironical prose of Jane Austen, it reads less like a novel than like a slice of an ongoing history; although the book is more than eight hundred pages long, it feels as if it were a mere fragment of a fully imagined reality. Clarke, who was born sixty years ago in Nottingham, began tinkering with the idea in 1992, while living in Bilbao and teaching English, having abandoned a detective novel whose plot and crime she could never quite settle on. In a recent conversation, Clarke, who lives in a cottage in Derbyshire, England, told me, of that period, “I thought, I’m not going to do this anymore. I’ve tried to be a writer, I cannot do it.” Then for a few weeks she came down with a mysterious illness that left her too tired to do much of anything. At the city’s English-language bookstore, she bought a copy of “The Lord of the Rings”—whose author, J. R. R. Tolkien, whatever his differences from Austen, had a similar ability to envelop his readers in a fictional world. “That got me through the illness,” she said. “I just read and read and read the whole thing.” Clarke decided to try her hand at fantasy, specifically a story about English magic, rooted in the English landscape. To do this successfully, she felt, she needed to return to Britain.
A decade later, “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” was published, with a degree of fanfare that startled Clarke and her husband, Colin Greenland, a novelist and a critic who, in 1981, received one of the first doctorates awarded by the University of Oxford for a thesis on science fiction. The couple had suspected that the novel’s appeal would be intense but “niche,” Greenland told me: “We thought, Maybe a hundred and fifty people are going to read this, and love it.” Instead, the book spent eleven weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. After Clarke did an eighteen-city publicity tour in the U.S. in September, 2004, her publisher asked her to return, three months later, for a nine-city follow-up tour. Greenland joined her both times.
The couple’s friend the novelist Neil Gaiman—who calls Clarke his favorite living fantasy writer and gave “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” a prepublication blurb declaring it “unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years”—advised them to mail their dirty laundry home and, if necessary, buy new clothes on the road. “You will not be in a hotel long enough so that you can give them your laundry in the morning and get it back at night, because by nightfall you will be in a different town,” he told them. Book promotion was exciting but, Clarke said, “physically quite stressful.” She added, “And I always feel bad saying so, because I know that many writers would love the experience I had.”
The publicity campaign was largely over by Christmas. The following March, Clarke and Greenland were dining at a friend’s house during a holiday elsewhere in Derbyshire when Clarke suddenly announced that she needed to go home and go to bed. “She stood up and stepped away from her chair,” Greenland recalled. “And, instead of walking around the table, she just crumpled. She woke up, and got a little bit further around the room, and then collapsed again. I can remember kneeling down with her on the floor.” He’d never seen her faint before. Clarke has not been entirely well since. “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,” meanwhile, has continued to thrive: it has sold more than four million copies worldwide, and in 2015 it was adapted into a miniseries by the BBC.
This month, Clarke is finally publishing a second novel, “Piranesi.” For the past fifteen years, she has suffered from an elusive, debilitating illness—seemingly, a vengeful return of the malady that had briefly afflicted her in Bilbao. She has been given various diagnoses, including Lyme disease, Epstein-Barr virus, and chronic fatigue syndrome. Her most constant symptom has been overwhelming exhaustion, joined at times by migraines, brain fog, and photosensitivity, as well as by nausea, for which she now takes medication daily. At times, she said, bright sunshine has felt “like an oppression, a weight leaning on me”; she often retreats to a darkened room. In the late two-thousands, when her illness was at its worst, she was unable to get out of bed, experiencing depression, social anxiety, and agoraphobia. During such episodes, she sometimes thought of a favorite book from her childhood, C. S. Lewis’s “The Magician’s Nephew,” in which the conniving of a malign sorcerer leaves two children stranded in the Wood Between the Worlds—a grove of trees and small pools, through which they can enter other universes. The wood is, among other things, a metaphor for a library. One of the places the children visit is the city of Charn, a landscape full of grand palaces but devoid of people. “I always liked Charn better than Lewis liked Charn,” Clarke told me. In the depths of her illness, she said, “I found having people in the same street with me quite difficult to deal with. Imagining that I was in Charn, that I was alone in a place like that, endless buildings but silent—I found that very calming.”
The similarity between Charn and the setting of Clarke’s new novel will occur to anyone who has read both books. “Piranesi” is narrated by a man who doesn’t remember his own name. He is the inhabitant of what he calls the House: an infinite multilevel succession of large marble halls linked by vestibules and stairways, and lined everywhere with statues. The House’s lower halls are sometimes flooded with seawater, and the upper halls are filled with clouds that shed rain. The middle level is the haunt of birds with whom the narrator often communes. He is unaware of any world beyond the House, and believes that only fifteen humans have ever lived, thirteen of whom are dead. He lovingly tends to the bones of the deceased, whom he can’t recall ever knowing, bringing them offerings of food and drink. He subsists on fish, crustaceans, and seaweed, gathered from the House’s submerged level. The only living human being the narrator knows is a well-dressed man he calls the Other. The Other studies the House, believing that it contains “a Great and Secret Knowledge” that will bestow special powers on its possessors, including immortality, telepathy, and flight. At one point, the Other nicknames the narrator Piranesi—a joke that the narrator does not get, because he does not know that another world exists, let alone that it once contained an eighteenth-century Italian artist famed for a series of etchings of magnificent, imaginary prisons.
Confinement, a sensation lately and keenly familiar to a large portion of this world’s inhabitants, has long been a fact of life for Clarke. She and I communicated through Zoom, and as we peered at each other through playing-card-size windows on our laptops—she in a bronze-colored cardigan, and I with a mass of uncut hair jammed into a makeshift bun—she explained that the overstuffed leather sofa she was sitting on, with a de Chirico print on the wall behind it, is where she spends much of her day. The sofa was all I was able to see of the cottage, a snug two-bedroom place that Clarke and Greenland bought, in 2006, as a getaway from their main home, in Cambridge. Although they have occasionally visited Cambridge during the past five years, they have spent most of that time at the cottage. Greenland told me that they’ve found the calm of the Derbyshire countryside to be much easier on Clarke. He doesn’t drive, though, so they subscribe to a recipe-box service for meals, and neighbors help out with the shopping.
Often while I spoke to Clarke I could hear Greenland in the background, clinking dishes in the kitchen sink. Later, he told me that Clarke gets up much earlier than he does, and tries to write for the few hours when her energy is at its peak. By the afternoon, she needs to rest, and even in the morning her ability to participate in, say, a demanding conversation is limited to about an hour. She is very private about whatever she’s working on; in fact, she can be a little cagey about whether she’s working on anything at all. “She’s on her sofa with her laptop,” Greenland said. “And I don’t know if she’s playing a game, if she’s watching TV, if she’s writing e-mails, or if she’s working. It’s not apparent to me. She’s in her bubble. But what I do know is that, for a long while, she was too ill to write. And then, after that, she was writing fragments.”
Many of these “bits,” as Clarke calls them, have been squirrelled away for possible inclusion in some future work. “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” is partly written in a style reminiscent of John Aubrey, the British scholar best known for his “Brief Lives” series of short biographies. In the novel, these passages come complete with footnoted anecdotes that document the history of English magic with a distinctive combination of whimsy and nineteenth-century punctiliousness. One such story mentions a chick, hatched from an enchanted egg, that “grew up and later started a fire that destroyed most of Grantham.” Clarke writes, “During the conflagration it was observed bathing itself in the flames. From this circumstance, it was presumed to be a phoenix.”
Although the origins of “Piranesi” predate Clarke’s illness, she did not commence intensive work on it until her symptoms abated, a few years ago. When she was living in London in her twenties, after taking a night class on the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, she told me, she latched on to the idea of a story about two people living in a gigantic house “with tides flowing through it.” One character would explore the structure and supply information about it to the other. Over the years, the idea returned to her now and again, but she never really got anywhere with it. After finishing “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,” she’d planned to write another novel set in the same world, but once she got sick—and even after she’d partly recovered—the prospect of taking on another huge book, especially one requiring extensive research into nineteenth-century history, seemed insurmountable. So she dug up “Piranesi,” which struck her as a much more feasible project. “My life has been spent largely housebound for many years,” she told me. “Yet I don’t think I realized, straightaway, all these resonances” between Piranesi’s captivity and her own. “As soon as I started working on it seriously, then I could see them.”
Clarke’s younger sister, Kate, a social worker, and Greenland both used the same term to describe her: “self-contained.” The eldest child of a Methodist minister and his wife, Clarke grew up in a family that moved every few years. Kate recalled a family trip to a holiday cottage in which she was “absolutely terrified” by the gruesome stories that Susanna spun for her about the saints depicted in Victorian paintings on the walls. As a result of the family’s many relocations, Kate said, her sister “always felt a little bit out of time, and slightly dislocated to the situation she was in.” As a writer, Clarke herself told me, she feels more at home in the nineteenth century than she does in the present.
When Clarke was thirteen, the family moved to the Yorkshire city of Bradford, which has landed on more than one list of the worst places to live in the U.K. Kate described the city as impoverished and “very raw”; Clarke, in a short essay about Bradford for the Guardian, remembered a pack of feral dogs that roamed the area, prompting announcements over school loudspeakers not to leave the building until the dogs were gone. Although she did finally make friends in Bradford, and even found a boyfriend, she always felt like an outsider there, and that cemented her childhood tendency to withdraw into an imaginative inner life fuelled by books and television. (The series “Arthur of the Britons,” set in the Middle Ages, was a favorite.)
Clarke was accepted at Oxford, where she received undistinguished marks in her course of study, Philosophy, Politics and Economics. “I’d been going to do history,” she told me. “And at some point I changed my mind and went to this. And I don’t know why.” Upon graduating, she took a series of jobs in book publishing. Then, in her late twenties, she felt that her social life was “shrinking down,” and, like many a compatriot before her, she went off to Italy in search of a more convivial mode of existence. She recalled, “One of the things I discovered by going abroad was that this sort of magical, wonderful social life, which I thought I ought to be having—with lots of friends and a boyfriend and going out—was actually not what I wanted. What I wanted to do was to stay in my room and write.” After her sojourn in Bilbao, she returned to England, nursing the germ of “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.” Originally, she’d planned to set the novel later in the nineteenth century, but her affinity for Austen pulled the setting back to the Regency period. “I’ve read them and reread them and reread them,” she said of Austen’s books. “I feel very much at home in those six novels.” She suspects that it’s because “the world somehow was a bit more human-scaled at that time.”
In November, 1993, she participated in a weeklong residential workshop on science fiction and fantasy, held at Lumb Bank, a house in Yorkshire that once belonged to Ted Hughes. Greenland was one of the instructors. Each student submitted a story before the workshop began. Greenland told me, “I remember opening the envelope—this brown envelope—and taking up this short story. It was called ‘The Ladies of Grace Adieu,’ by Susanna Clarke, and I started reading. I thought, What is this? This is amazing.” He called up his co-instructor, who had also seen the manuscript, and they “cooed” to each other about “the Jane Austen one.” Once the workshop convened, in its snowy, isolated setting, Greenland felt immediately attracted to Clarke, who had the serene, oval face of a porcelain cameo and a curtain of prematurely white hair. But he took pains not to pay too much attention to her, or to show any favoritism. “I must be very professional,” he told himself. “And not just because she’s the most talented writer I’ve ever met.” At a party on the last night of the workshop, Greenland finally felt free to “monopolize” her, and the two began a relationship, which never ended up including much editorial advice from Greenland. He said of the class, “She didn’t really want us to do anything other than say, ‘Yes—please keep going.’ ” He did not read “Piranesi” until Clarke had completed her first draft. She needed, Greenland said, only for him to tell her, “Yes, this is a complete thing. This is not a broken thing or a failed attempt. This is a book.”
Escorting Clarke’s work from the hermetic place where it is created to the outside world has become something of a vocation for Greenland. His enthusiasm for “The Ladies of Grace Adieu” prompted him to send the story to Gaiman, an old friend of his, without telling Clarke. Gaiman admired it so much that he forwarded it to Patrick Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor Books, an imprint specializing in fantasy and science fiction. Hayden soon contacted a surprised Clarke with an offer to buy the story for an anthology that he was editing. She found the experience a little unsettling but went on to contribute stories to subsequent anthologies of Hayden’s, while struggling to shape the fragments that would become “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.” She was prone to lose faith in her ability to complete the book, and even in the merits of completing it at all. “I had a meltdown,” she told me. “And I’d had meltdowns before. Colin said, ‘What you need to do now is to get an agent.’ ”
The late Giles Gordon, a legendary character at the Curtis Brown agency, agreed to represent her after reading only three chapters. To Clarke’s great amusement, he told her, “If I hadn’t met you, I would assume this book was written by an elderly man.” He sold it to Bloomsbury U.K. for an advance of three hundred thousand pounds—before Clarke had completed it. When I asked her if she would have been able to finish the novel without this combination of encouragement and obligation, she replied, “Possibly not.” She then added, “I certainly find it difficult to believe that I would have finished it without Colin.”
Early in “Piranesi,” the reader comes to doubt the narrator’s understanding of his situation. Despite Piranesi’s belief that the House is the only world he has ever known, and the only world that exists, as he journeys from hall to hall cataloguing the statues, and contemplating their significance, he easily recognizes and names the objects that they depict—a beehive, a rosebush, a gorilla—even though these things do not exist in the House. He admires and trusts the Other, yet the reader soon perceives that this trust is misplaced. Piranesi spends almost all his time alone, but he is happy in a way many modern people might envy. The world that he inhabits is, in his eyes, beautiful and filled with meaning; the statues he studies and the animals he encounters, when carefully interpreted, supply all the wisdom he needs to chart a proper course forward. “The World feels Complete and Whole,” he observes, writing in a notebook supplied to him by the Other. “And I, its Child, fit into it seamlessly. Nowhere is there any disjuncture where I ought to remember something but do not, where I ought to understand something but do not.” Only someone able to occupy a position outside the House could perceive that there is much he doesn’t understand, and even more that he has forgotten.
Forgetting has been a persistent theme in Clarke’s work. In “Mrs. Mabb,” a story from “The Ladies of Grace Adieu,” a collection that she published in 2006, a young woman named Venetia learns that her sweetheart has taken up with the title character, a wealthy widow, and has disappeared. Everyone in town has a different idea about the location of Mrs. Mabb’s house, including some children who insist that it is “at the bottom of Billy Little’s garden,” behind “a great heap of cabbage leaves.” Every time Venetia tries to follow people’s directions, she is discovered hours later, scratched up and wandering in a lane or a churchyard, with no memory of how she got there. Of course, Queen Mab is a fairy described by Mercutio in “Romeo and Juliet”—a tiny being who tangles the manes of horses and infects the minds of sleepers with tempting and troubling dreams.
In “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,” the bookish Mr. Norrell establishes his reputation as “a practical magician” by resurrecting the dead bride of Sir Walter Pole, a Cabinet minister. He accomplishes this with the aid of a fairy known only as “the gentleman with the thistledown hair.” Like all fairies in Clarke’s fiction, the gentleman is vain, capricious, amoral, and dangerous, especially if you’re bargaining with him. In exchange for assisting Mr. Norrell, the gentleman claims half of Lady Pole’s life, compelling her to spend every night dancing at balls in his dreary castle. These nocturnal exertions leave her spent and joyless during the day. Whenever she attempts to explain the cause of her exhaustion to anybody, the words coming out of her mouth instead tell peculiar stories. And so the despairing Lady Pole “sat, hour after hour, wrapped in her shawl, neither moving nor speaking,” as “bad dreams and shadows gathered about her.”
When I noted the similarity between Lady Pole’s affliction and Clarke’s, she said, “Several people have pointed this out to me—that, having written a long book in which there was a nineteenth-century illness, I then had a nineteenth-century illness. Or that I wrote a long book in which there was this sort of enchantment, and then fell into this strange enchantment myself. It’s absolutely right.” She joked, “You really shouldn’t annoy fairies, or write about them—they don’t like it very much.”
Fantastic literature and folklore are full of supernatural metaphors for emotional states like depression, from the Dementors of the Harry Potter books to the Spectres of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” series, both of which feed on human souls. The fact that Clarke had an earlier experience with extended fatigue, in Bilbao, makes her depiction of Lady Pole’s plight seem to be less of an uncanny coincidence. But could Clarke’s episode in Spain have been worse than she remembered? It struck me that her recollection of her more recent, lengthier illness is not always quite correct. In 2006, I travelled to Derbyshire to interview Clarke for a book that I was researching, on C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series. Accompanied by Greenland, we went on a hike over the region’s spectacular moorlands; visited the gardens at Chatsworth House, the seat of the Duke of Devonshire; and ate lunch at one of the couple’s favorite pubs. I had no inkling that she was ill. Yet Clarke recalls this period as one of unrelieved disability. When I reminded her of all we’d done, and of how healthy she’d looked to me then, she was puzzled. After a pause, she said, “In that case, I mustn’t have been so bad earlier on.”
Illness can seem to bend time, and it can warp memories, but when it’s not too crushing it can also create welcome pockets of solitude, freeing an invalid to roam through the halls of her imagination, as Clarke appears to have done in Bilbao, devouring Tolkien. Greenland, who has suffered from severe asthma and eczema since infancy, and spent a lot of his early years in bed or in the hospital, told me, “Susanna is somebody who had to learn how to be ill”—that is, how to conserve her energy and accept her limits. What can seem like constraint can sometimes offer up unexpected vistas. In 1885, Robert Louis Stevenson, who also had a sickly childhood, published a poem, “The Land of Counterpane,” about the stories and adventures that he invented for the toys arrayed on the bed where he was confined, as he—“the giant great and still”—overlooked it all. When I suggested to Greenland that his own boyhood hours alone in bed had made him a reader, and by extension a writer, he agreed. “I was always reading,” he said. “That was where life was for me. It was in books.”
Clarke’s most recent illness, however, became so extreme that it offered no creative benefit. Its nadir, Greenland recalled, was “very, very dark—she was very depressed, very, very angry, and alienated from everything and everybody.” She could not get out of bed or communicate with anyone, not even Greenland: “It was just the opposite of the woman that I’d met, who was so strong and sharp and funny and bright.” While she was infirm, he took care of the house and handled her business affairs.
Although physicians sometimes characterize constellations of symptoms similar to Clarke’s as “post-viral,” she can recall no viral infection prior to her collapse in 2005, and it’s hard not to view the hoopla and travel surrounding the publication of “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” as a precipitant. The publicity tours appear to have upset a delicate balance in Clarke, between the solitude that fosters her writing and the demands of a clamorous world that was so delighted to receive it. Her illness, like a vengeful fairy, cast her into a fallen version of Piranesi’s contented seclusion—a poisoned loneliness where she was swathed in bad dreams, shadows, and suffering.
Clarke told me that several things contributed to the eventual improvement in her condition, making “Piranesi” possible. At a private hospital in Hemel Hempstead, she received such alternative treatments as food supplements, an all-organic diet, and a version of homeopathy. She told me, “You’ll see people saying, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t go off on these alternative-medicine treatments. You should stick to proper science.’ ” But such critics failed to grasp that “nobody was doing the science—it was only the alternative people who were offering anything at all.” She went on, “It wasn’t like I had a choice. It was either that or nothing.” In 2006, Clarke found a progressive Anglican church in Cambridge, and she felt spiritually at home there in a way she never had amid the disapproving Methodism of her childhood. The Cambridge church was a place, she told me, where “you wouldn’t be judged for asking a question or for saying, ‘I have these sorts of doubts.’ It was a church that attracted people who’d been quite damaged by other churches.” Finally, in 2013, she visited the set of the BBC adaptation of “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.” She recalled, “I was a bit taken aback by the way everybody treated me as an author. I had got so used to this idea of myself as an invalid, this rather ill middle-aged woman. It was quite amazing that they didn’t see me that way.” For the first time in years, she could imagine being an author again.
The pandemic, which has winnowed so many other lives, has expanded Clarke’s. She’s taken avidly to Zoom, and uses it to participate in online church services. She’s begun writing short, witty essays on spiritual topics for a church newsletter. (“Jesus talked to lots of women,” a recent piece notes. “It was one of the things he did that worried people.”) She can participate in interviews from her sofa, in increments of time that do not exceed the limits of her energy. And, because of the widespread lockdowns, there are no demands for a conventional publicity tour. Clarke has begun work on a new novel—one that she doesn’t mind talking about. It will be set partly in Bradford. “It’s an anti-horror novel,” she told me. Which means? “Horror novels have this idea that there’s a kind of secret at the center of the world. And that secret is horrific.” This, Clarke observes, “isn’t much of a secret, really.” Anyone can look around at the world and see that. “So this would be more about the fact that, at the center of things, there’s a secret or mystery, and it is joyful.”
“Piranesi” often feels like a book about writing a book, the unending halls a version of the boundless and unruly possibility of a work that has yet to take on the form it must adopt if it is ever going to be accessible to other people. Its narrator lives in a kind of dream that obscures the truth about his past and about his relationship to the Other. Clarke told me that the environment she created for her protagonist was alluring to her, too: “On the one hand, people have died there, and it’s quite a harsh and dangerous environment. But with the statues, and this classical, ordered world, and these vistas going on forever—like Piranesi, I find that quite beautiful.” The House reflects her lifelong attraction to vast, grand, deserted places like Lewis’s Charn. But as she came closer to finishing the novel she felt uneasy about the fact that she was “contained in a shell of illness, almost protected.” She explained, “Illness becomes a sort of protection against the world after a while.” By finishing the book, she said, “there was the danger that that shell would crack, and I would have to go out into the world.”
In the novel, an additional character—a person whom Piranesi calls 16—is required to coax him out of his state of perpetual illusion. For much of the narrative, 16 is unseen, a presence that jostles the narrator to recall the unremembered life that he has left behind. By the end of the book, the narrator has decided that, among the statues in the House, the one that most reminds him of 16 is an androgynous figure “walking forward, holding a lantern.” Piranesi gets a sense “of a huge darkness surrounding” this figure, and also of solitude, “perhaps by choice or perhaps because no one else was courageous enough” to follow 16 into the labyrinthine House, in an attempt to reconnect its lone inhabitant with the ordinary world. This plunge into the unknown was, Piranesi now understands, a “magnificent” act. The novel ends a few pages later. Its dedication reads “For Colin.” ♦
