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. 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. I can remember kneeling down with her on the floor.” He’d never seen her faint before. She woke up, and got a little bit further around the room, and then collapsed again. “And, instead of walking around the table, she just crumpled. “She stood up and stepped away from her chair,” Greenland recalled. 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. The publicity campaign was largely over by Christmas. 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.” “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. 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. The couple’s friend the novelist Neil Gaiman-who calls Clarke his favorite living fantasy writer and gave “Jonathan Strange & Mr. in September, 2004, her publisher asked her to return, three months later, for a nine-city follow-up tour. After Clarke did an eighteen-city publicity tour in the U.S. 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. 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.
To do this successfully, she felt, she needed to return to Britain.Ī decade later, “Jonathan Strange & Mr. “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.
“That got me through the illness,” she said. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Norrell,” published in 2004, is one of those. 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.Ĭertain books, particularly novels, invite many readers to inhabit their realms over and over again, and Susanna Clarke’s début, “ Jonathan Strange & Mr. 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. Often, this space feels like a sanctuary. The author, the sole inhabitant, wanders from room to room, choosing the furnishings, correcting imperfections, adding new wings. Writing a book is like moving into an imaginary house. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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