Tumnus-like Faun that, he imagines, is warning him about something.

The walls are crammed with statues - the Woman carrying a Beehive, the Elephant carrying a Castle, and Piranesi’s favorite, a Mr. The world of “Piranesi,” meanwhile, is built entirely from scratch, at first as devoid of life as an Escher sketch but gradually filled in until it’s as rich as a second universe. “ Jonathan Strange” evoked the silk-hung bedrooms and dusty streets of early 19th-century London, a brilliant, layered conjuring from the past. (Remember his name.) Clarke is dropping bread crumbs a curious reader can follow back to the novel’s ancestral inspirations: alternate worlds, the corruption of innocence, the preoccupations of the vainglorious. Of course I need subjects to do it on.” That’s Andrew Ketterly speaking, the imperious and heartless uncle who sends two children off to “the wood between the worlds” that leads to Narnia. Lewis’ Narnia prequel “ The Magician’s Nephew”: “I am the great scholar, the magician, the adept, who is doing the experiment. Instead, she creates a dazzling world of infinite fascination inside the musings of one very simple man.įrom the beginning, we know that magic will abound. I’d worried that, all these years later, Clarke might have grown timid, seeking a breather from all the grand historical world-building. But “ Piranesi,” out this week after 16 years between novels, is a little imp of a book that packs a punch several times its (relatively) meager page count. Enchantment is everywhere, and it crackles, in the tiniest drops of water and the most consequential routs in history, like Waterloo.Ĭlarke has explained that chronic fatigue syndrome kept her from embarking on another 800-plus page enterprise. He moves roads and sets brooks flowing in the wrong direction, eventually summoning a thundercloud “so full and heavy that its ragged skirts seemed to brush the tops of the trees.” The French cavalry struggles in the sucking mud, stymied by what they think is weather, though we know it is ancient magic. In one pivotal moment, Strange, the apprentice magician to Norrell, arrives in a Belgian village on behalf of the British government, turning his magic against Napoleon’s indomitable army. In “ Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell,” Susanna Clarke’s 2004 lightning bolt of a debut, magic spurts out of stones and fields, slips into dreams and Regency-era ballrooms, rouses dead young ladies. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.

Susanna clarke