This book is a masterpiece too, but in a different way. An intense curiosity about the author who had managed to write what Neil Gaiman described as “unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years” grew up around Clarke, but much like the elusive gentlemen with the thistledown hair who flits through its pages, shortly after its release, Clarke vanished from public life.
And yet the novel enjoyed a period of astonishing success, longlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize, winner of the 2005 Hugo Award for the Best Novel, and remaining in the New York Times Bestseller list for eleven weeks straight. It reads like a cult classic, something with which nerdy literary types become obsessed, only to bemoan its lack of global popularity. The book is a masterful curio, an ode to scholarship, interspersed with fictitious footnotes recounting fairy stories so vivid that the reader can’t help but find herself believing, for a moment, that they are historical fact. A book, in short, particularly suited to our present anxieties.Ĭlarke made her debut sixteen years ago with Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, a sprawling tale of two magicians in an alternative history, whose fierce scholarly rivalry brings about the restoration of magic in England.
It is a book about alienation and loneliness, our frustrated desire to be at home in the world and with each other. The world of Piranesiis bounded, precise, lonesome and yet as I lived in it, I could feel my soul expanding. But what I found in my hands was something rather different from her first volume: a modest book of less than three hundred pages, about a man who lives in a house that loves him. So the moment I heard Susanna Clarke was coming out with a new novel, I rushed to my nearest book-monger, prepared to joyfully devour nine hundred pages on absolutely whatever her imagination had seen fit to produce: fairies, footnotes, Byron, the Battle of Waterloo. In times of turmoil, I like to console myself by disappearing into the world of a book. The beauty of the House is immeasurable its kindness infinite.