But here’s the thing: it is also more than that. Layer #1 is in the title, Piranesi, which is also the name of the protagonist. I’ll mention three layers of meaning worth exploring and discussing. She leaves us clues, and they aren’t all that subtle. Clarke lets us know from the opening page that there is more than mere story here. Piranesi is also delightfully multi-layered.
#Piranesi discussion questions series#
To have Piranesi read aloud over a series of evenings, with candles lit, a fireplace burning, a shared cup of tea or glass of bourbon, and a circle of beloved friends sharing the experience would be a foretaste of what I believe life should be about.
Clarke imagines a world for us to enter, with interesting characters to meet and learn to know, and a plot that unfolds so that we care about what happens and why. This 2020 novel is brief (245 pages of larger print compared to 1006 pages in my edition of Jonathan Strange & Mr. On this level, fantasy becomes reality.Īnd that brings me to Piranesi, also by Susanna Clarke. Though it’s not fashionable to assert this, life and death can hang on what we believe, on how we see, and who we listen to. Clarke makes it clear that to be mistaken in such things can lead not merely to the momentary embarrassment of being wrong, but to great loss. So, we find ourselves taking sides as readers, drawn into a story that functions as a subtle, imaginative exercise in epistemology that mirrors our experience in life.
Like the very public falling out of Freud and Jung in the early 20 thcentury, or the vigorous debates between Roman Catholic and Reformed theologians in the 16 th century, Strange and Norrell are both British magicians but fail to agree on almost anything, each dismissing the other as less than trustworthy. Norrell is also a fascinating study of how human beings adopt beliefs and values in a world where aggressively competing voices of authority argue for wildly conflicting perspectives, ideas, and values. On the level of metaphor Jonathan Strange & Mr. How could it be otherwise?Īnd there is still more. “The prophet is a fool,” the ancient Hebrew seer, Hosea observes, “the man of the spirit is mad” (9:7). When people stray from the truth and believe myths based on idolatrous conspiracies and ideologies, those what speak truth appear insane. And like other fantasies that include characters with special insight-such as Watership Down and the visionary rabbit, Fiver-Clarke weaves together gifts of revelation with intriguing hints of madness. Norrell is not merely a very good story, it is also a penetrating and entertaining parody of class in British society, in the tradition of Jane Austin. There were times I skipped ahead simply to read and enjoy the footnotes, which were stories worth reading on their own.īut there is more than just amusement. For example, her creative use of footnotes-so unusual in a novel-was highly amusing to me. And yes, I loved the intricate level of detail Clarke wove into the narrative. I love my wife, and recommend No Place, and the other two books that make up her Place Trilogy series of memoirs. She is speaking, I have no doubt, about me. And they love anything that’s written with an English accent, whether good or not.” People who like this novel are obsessed with details-unimportant details. “I read about 300 pages and with 500 more to go, I just could not subject myself to that sort of punishment,” says Margie Haack, author of No Place. “It was annoying that the print was so small that one needs a magnifying glass to read the dang thing. This view of Clarke’s book is not, I should add, shared by all.
Norrell after 800 pages, my only regret was that it wasn’t twice the length.” “Unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years,” Neil Gaiman, author of the very fine fantasy, American Gods says in his endorsement. Susanna Clarke is probably best known for her 2004 fantasy novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr.
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