Clarke cautiously describes it as being “about a man who lives in a House in which an Ocean is imprisoned”. Piranesi is indeed brilliantly peculiar, and almost impossible to introduce without spoilers, since it subverts expectations throughout.
“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 appears on 15 September, 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 4m 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. S ixteen years ago, Susanna Clarke’s debut novel became a publishing phenomenon.
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