Our narrator Piranesi lives in a vast house that contains an ocean. “And that’s just the way it has been ever since.” “I found Lewis at a very impressionable age and then he sort of organised the inside of my head,” she says. If Jonathan Strange was a riotous meeting of Austen and Dickens, then Piranesi’s pole stars are Jorge Luis Borges and CS Lewis. The title recalls the 18th-century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose Escher-like etchings of Imaginary Prisons, with their formal elegance and impossible architecture, spaces at once cavernous and claustrophobic, conjure up the novel’s unsettling sense of recognisable and unreal worlds colliding. Piranesi is not the much-longed-for sequel although slimmer and quieter than Jonathan Strange, it is equally inventive, immersive and hard to pin down.
“It all seemed so long ago and far away, like something that happened to somebody else.” I found Lewis at a very impressionable age and then he sort of organised the inside of my head Susanna Clarke “I’d really ceased to think of myself as a writer,” she says. “Sometimes I would feel that life stretched ahead but it was kind of blank and that was quite frightening.”Īn invitation on to the set of the BBC miniseries for Jonathan Strange in 2015 gave her the boost to start writing again. She was eventually diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, which at its worst left her housebound and depressed. “Having written about a woman with a 19th-century illness I then seemed to fall prey to a 19th-century illness myself,” she says.
Six months after the publication of Jonathan Strange in 2004, when she was 44, she passed out at a dinner party and hasn’t been well since.
“We arrived back at the hotel and we just drank camomile tea and flopped.”Īs she explained in a tearful acceptance speech, this was a book she thought she would never be able to write. But not for Clarke the traditional bleary-eyed morning-after interview. I haven’t processed it at all,” the author says from a hotel room in London, after the ceremony (one of the first post-lockdown publishing bashes) the previous evening. An otherworldly study of solitude, celebrating everyday consolations and the comfort of nature, Piranesi appeared with uncanny timing just as we were beginning to emerge from a period of all too real isolation.
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