Piranesi review new yorker12/30/2023 ![]() The magic, kidnapping fairies, and Other Lands were already in place, but without the solid anchoring in the nonfairy world that made Jonathan Strange so full-bodied.Īn early sign as to why came in 2007 when, answering questions on a blog duly called The Friends of English Magic, Clarke mentioned that she had been “dogged by ill-health for two years now and it’s holding up progress on any new work rather seriously.” Yet only in recent interviews has the extent of her ill health become apparent. On the whole, however, these apprentice works did feel like apprentice works. The collection had its moments, especially the title story that first alerted Gaiman to Clarke’s talent in 1992. “I feel very much at home in the early nineteenth century and am not inclined to leave it.” In the meantime, as her readers waited, 2006 brought The Ladies of Grace Adieu, a collection of eight short stories, seven of which had previously been published-mostly in the 1990s-with the eighth expanding on an untypically short footnote in Jonathan Strange. “The next book will be set in the same world,” she told one interviewer. Inevitably, after the book’s success, Clarke’s fans (and presumably her publishers) were soon clamoring for a sequel-and at first she seemed happy to oblige. It’s just that he did so with the help of Jonathan Strange’s handy ability to move rivers and temporarily shift Brussels to the middle of America. The Duke of Wellington, for example, still defeated Napoleon. But the magic was also ingeniously interwoven with history of a more recognizable kind. Among other things, this included a race of malevolent fairies who had the regrettable habit of kidnapping mortals into Other Lands. ![]() Certainly, it’s hard to think of another thousand-page, densely plotted, heavily footnoted debut novel about magicians in Regency England that went on to sell more than four million copies, to become a Time Book of the Year, and to inspire a TV miniseries, any number of obsessive fansites, and a board game.Įven Neil Gaiman, an early champion of Clarke’s, whose one regret about the novel is that it wasn’t twice as long, thought it “would be too unusual…for the general public.” Not only did Clarke appear to take the existence of magic for granted, but she gave its specifically English form a backstory spanning seven hundred years-which is where all those footnotes came in. ![]() The phrase “surprise best seller”-often applied to more or less any book that achieves some commercial success despite not being by John Grisham, Nicholas Sparks, or James Patterson-can rarely have been used more accurately than it was about Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Susanna Clarke, Derbyshire, England, 2016
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