The madness of Susanna Clarke, fairy princess | A... https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/09/the-mad...

SUBSCRIBE SIGN IN

COMMUNICATE THE INCOMMUNICABLE —

The madness of Susanna Clarke, fairy

princess
After more than a decade away, the fantasy author is back with Piranesi.
JASON KEHE, WIRED.COM - 9/26/2020, 8:45 PM
Amazon / Bloomsbury

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell fans, it's a good fall.

Do fairies exist? To steal us away, to cast curses, to impurify our bloodlines? Let’s say yes. We have
artists, don’t we? Sensitive types, so fragile and retreating. The best of them seem touched by an
otherness, an otherlandishness, of being. Maybe a small part of their humanity was bargained away
without their knowing. A pinky finger. A left eyeball. That’s why they don’t stomp through the world as
the rest of us do, very loudly. On those rare occasions when they’re seen to leave their homes, they
sort of flicker—fairly float—across the way. Whatever you do, don’t startle the fairy-people, or you’ll

1 of 6 27/09/2020, 10:14 am
The madness of Susanna Clarke, fairy princess | A... https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/09/the-mad...

scare them off. Just look at what befell Susanna Clarke.

In 2004, Clarke published what can only be described as her first dispatch from the land of Faerie. Ten
years in the making and 846 (footnoted!) pages long, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was ethnography,
lore. It was as if she’d been there, to England, at the time of Napoleon, when those two infamous
magicians, the bookworm Norrell and his perky pupil Strange, tapped into unearthly powers to
impress politicians, move mountains, and defeat the French. That’s not how it happened, you say?
Why, yes it is. You simply haven’t read your hidden history.

The events that followed only proved Clarke’s preternatural

pedigree. After the publication, in 2006, of The Ladies of Grace Adieu
and Other Stories, a collection of fairy tales written around the same
time, and in the same world, as Strange & Norrell, Clarke went poof.
Yumpy. Far, far away. For 14 years. The official story was debilitating mental illness—housebound,
couldn’t write—but clearly her fairy patrons had come for her, to reclaim their erstwhile princess. Or
else they meant to punish Clarke for her betrayal, for spilling their precious secrets, by enfuzzing her
beautiful brain. Something like that. The ways and reasons of the Fae are little known to common folk.

If this strikes you as cutesy, tidy, annoying, even a bit disturbing, a romanticization or fancification of
what sounds like a period of immense torture for Clarke and her loved ones, consider their own
words. “It was as though she’d been captured into the land of Faerie, as if she had been taken away
from us,” Clarke’s editor told New York magazine. Clarke herself, in a rare interview, told The New
Yorker, “You really shouldn’t annoy fairies, or writeabout them—they don’t like it very much.” Given
that Clarke has now released a second dispatch from Faerie, called Piranesi, which plunges far deeper
than Strange & Norrell ever did into those forbidden fortresses from which the un-mad and mortal
among us are forever barred, perhaps there’s no better explanation. Clarke has indeed been there
and back again.

Mirrors help
In Strange & Norrell, Clarke reports on the various ways an enterprising soul might make it to the fairy
realm, which is located, difficultly, “behind the sky” and “on the other side of the rain.” Mirrors help, if
you know the enchantment; if you don’t, make friends with an evil fairy king who desires your soul.
Whatever it takes, because Faerie is the wellspring of magic, magic which seems to have trickled out
of England sometime in the 1500s.

Three centuries later, Gilbert Norrell rolls up, bewigged and less than bemused, to bring it back. “To
restore,” as he likes to put it, “English magic.” An obsessive-compulsive hoarder of arcane spellbooks,
he alone possesses the know-how, until a young country woman demands of her dissolute boyfriend
that he shape up and find a job. Thus Jonathan Strange becomes England’s second working magician.
He and Norrell pass through stages of friendship and enemyship and eventually settle on something
like frenemyship. Elder and upstart, conservative and liberal, scholar and seeker, loner and lover—
they’re your classic dyad, two halves making a whole.

One irksome point of contention between these boys: Norrell won’t give Strange directions to Faerie,
so Strange must hack together a DIY solution. It’s not pretty, this process, for it involves cooking a

2 of 6 27/09/2020, 10:14 am
The madness of Susanna Clarke, fairy princess | A... https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/09/the-mad...

decrepit old cat lady down into the essence of her crazy. Tastes something unspeakable, but if fairies
are “barely sane” by human standards, Strange reasons, then to reach them one must get, as it were,
on their level. In the end, Clarke’s book really isn’t about the restoration of English magic. It’s about the
restoration of English madness.

Madness, for Clarke as for so many of her fellow fairy- FURTHER READING
folk over the ages, confers certain compensations. “It Ars’ summer reading guide for our
used to be well known that when fairies hid themselves very surreal summer
from general sight,” Clarke writes, “lunatics were often
able to perceive them.” (Strange discovers this when the
King of England, blind and batshit, makes effortless conversation with the fairy king.) The olden-time
mages, she adds, “regarded madmen as seers and prophets and listened to their ramblings with the
closest attention.” For all its agonies, madness awakens in its sufferers the gift of fairy sight, access to
those deepest truths covered up by centuries of mannish toil and industry.

The only possible conclusion is: Clarke is writing from experience. There’s stuff in Strange & Norrell no
normie could know, like the secret ingredient of regret-colored pigment (“the tears of spinsters of
good family, who must live long lives of impeccable virtue and die without ever having had a day of
true happiness”). Or the meaning of a rose at one’s lips. Or the way a fairy sublimely sings. “The world
is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands,” Clarke
writes. “In the fairy’s song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.” Here’s a writer who
is at her most lucid precisely when she’s articulating the highest insanities. If not quite a defense of
madness, Strange & Norrell is an argument for at least a little more of it in the modern world. More
freakiness. More fairyness. When Strange quaffs a safer titration of his crazy potion, he doesn’t crack
up. Instead, he journeys within: “He found that he no longer cared very much about magic. Doors
slammed in his mind and he went wandering off into rooms and hallways inside himself that he had
not visited in years.”

This was to be the very thing Clarke would do, in the addled years spent thinking about, and then
writing, Piranesi.

Magic has long been extinct

Giovanni Battista Piranesi was a mid-18th-century Italian artist, best known for his black-and-white,
proto-Escherian etchings of fantastical architectures, particularly his Prisons series. Clarke must be a
fan. She mentions Piranesi in both Strange & Norrell and Ladies of Grace Adieu, and Piranesi prints are
glimpsed in the 2015 BBC adaptation of the former. His work conjures the giddy terror of being
caught in a good maze, like Norrell’s twisting manor, or the land of Faerie.

The Piranesi of Clarke’s new novel, its narrator and main character, is not an artist, but he is a man
trapped in an infinite megastructure. Fabulous and frightening, Piranesi calls it “the House” but also,
at times, “the World”—“since the two are for all practical purposes identical,” he says. One is made to
think of Jorge Luis Borges, who must be Clarke’s fairy godfather. Like the House, Borges’ labyrinths
exist ab aeterno and are, for all practical purposes, the universe.

Piranesi isn’t the narrator’s real name; that’s only what his warder, known as the Other, calls him. As

3 of 6 27/09/2020, 10:14 am
The madness of Susanna Clarke, fairy princess | A... https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/09/the-mad...

far as we can tell, Piranesi and the Other are the sole
inhabitants of the House. Meaning the only two people
in the entire world. The House is all they know: its
endless statue-strewn rooms and the pelagic waters
that periodically flood them. This is not, in other words,
the 19th-century Europe of Strange & Norrell (even if it,
too, concerns a manly dyad). In fact, the House is not of
this earth at all. Though we meet no actual fairies in
Piranesi, it must be to their otherworldly realm that
these souls have been banished.

Piranesi is a mystery, a mystery of the mind, a way for

Clarke to communicate the incommunicable. What is
this place? Why is Piranesi, so wonderstruck and
innocent, stuck there? Reading it, one can’t help but

Amazon / Bloomsbury
imagine its origins in Clarke’s own life, the years she
spent sick, dissociating, wandering the rooms and
hallways, Strange-like, inside her head. “The labyrinth
plays tricks on the mind,” the Other tells Piranesi. “If
you’re not careful it can unpick your entire personality.”
A devastating verb, unpick. Something a fairy might do,
come to think, with a scalpel of unimaginable delicacy. Enlarge
Which Clarke would have felt, surely, throughout that
decade-plus in private lockdown, always at the intimate
mercy of its blade.

After everything Clarke has endured, one might expect her to hate fairy guts, to make these conniving,
tyrannical creatures, and the madness for which they are metaphors, the ultimate enemy. She won’t.
She refuses. Because to do so would be to lose: herself and everything else. As the tragedy of
Piranesi’s circumstances unfogs, he holds fast to brightness, the treasures acquired along the way. For
he knows the miracles madness makes, whose names are whimsy and wonder. “Magic has long been
extinct in these islands,” as Jonathan Strange once lamented, speaking of his world as well as our own.
To which he could’ve added, as Clarke writes in Piranesi: “Once, men and women were able to turn
themselves into eagles and fly immense distances. They communed with rivers and mountains and
received wisdom from them. They felt the turning of the stars inside their own minds.”

That Susanna Clarke has done and felt such things, these turnings and communions, falls somewhere
in the realm of absolute truth. A blessed being, she has performed the long-lost miracles, and she has
lived, more miraculous still, to tell the tale. With great effort, she has un-unpicked her personality and
returned to this world, our Earth, so that the rest of us might know her exquisite burden. Welcome
back, Fairy Mistress, if only for a spell! We are grateful to you, oh yes, but we mourn you a little, too—
that you must work so hard to be human.

This story first appeared at wired.com.

4 of 6 27/09/2020, 10:14 am
The madness of Susanna Clarke, fairy princess | A... https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/09/the-mad...

READER COMMENTS 29 SHARE THIS STORY

LGR's Clint Basinger

Reacts To His Top
1000 YouTube
Comments

How One Gameplay

Decision Changed
Diablo Forever

LGR's Clint Basinger Reacts To His How Forza's Racing

AI Uses Neural
Top 1000 YouTube Comments Networks To Evolve
We searched LGR's most popular videos and picked the
top 1000 comments based on number of likes, first
comments, and frequently asked questions. From
30 People Play Mario
looking back on his earliest efforts to revisiting some of Kart 8 From
his biggest reviews and unboxing videos, we've woven Newbies to Pros
together Clint's personal history with LGR - and captured
his reactions to the whole thing. Thank you to YouTube
user, naswinger for "The 7th Guest" gameplay footage. + More videos

← PREVIOUS STORY NEXT STORY →

Related Stories
Today on Ars

STORE CONTACT US NEWSLETTER SIGNUP

SUBSCRIBE STAFF Join the Ars Orbital Transmission mailing list to
ABOUT US ADVERTISE WITH US get weekly updates delivered to your inbox.
RSS FEEDS REPRINTS
VIEW MOBILE SITE

5 of 6 27/09/2020, 10:14 am
The madness of Susanna Clarke, fairy princess | A... https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/09/the-mad...

SIGN ME UP →

CNMN Collection
WIRED Media Group
© 2020 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User
Agreement (updated 1/1/20) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 1/1/20) and Ars Technica Addendum (effective
8/21/2018). Ars may earn compensation on sales from links on this site. Read our affiliate link policy.
Your California Privacy Rights | Do Not Sell My Personal Information
The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior
written permission of Condé Nast.
Ad Choices

6 of 6 27/09/2020, 10:14 am