![]() The natural comparison this time around would be to Mervyn Peake’s Castle Gormenghast, except that the House – somehow both Gothic and Baroque – is presented to us neither as a magical part of our world nor as part of another, fantasy world. He devotes his days within it to understanding its tidal systems, the pattern of the stars in the sky above, entering these facts into journals that he does not entirely understand himself. But Piranesi knows the House from the inside as one for whom there is no outside. ![]() The Other sometimes conveys the impression that he understands something about the nature of Piranesi’s reality that Piranesi himself does not. ![]() The name Piranesi is given to our narrator by the only other living soul who inhabits, or perhaps sporadically visits, the House, an unsettling figure that Piranesi knows only as “the Other”. He has no memory of a time that he didn’t live in the House. Piranesi is, when we start, the only name we have for our narrator, the inhabitant of a curious House that is also, for all he knows, the World (the upper-case letters are his). Piranesi, despite being a fraction of the length of its predecessor, has something of the earlier book’s ambition, the sense of a world fully imagined and richly evoked, but still only imperfectly grasped by the book’s characters. But far from restricting herself to Austen’s famed two inches of ivory, Clarke devised an alternative history of England and its forgotten traditions of magic, traditions that were revealed to be, like other English things, alternately whimsical and sinister. ![]() The voice of the earlier book was ironic, a self-conscious pastiche of Jane Austen at her wryest. These epigraphs could have served well enough to whet the appetite for a further course of the epic and fantastical Regency adventure that she served up in the breathtaking Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004). The second is from a certain Laurence Arne-Sayles, who turns out to be a figure from within the fiction we are about to read, declaring himself a scholar of the forgotten, of the “curious gaps between things”. The first of Susanna Clarke’s epigraphs to her mysterious new novel, our first clues to what it might be about, is from a remark of the odious amateur magician Uncle Andrew Ketterley from C S Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, declaring himself “the adept, who is doing the experiment. ![]()
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