20 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020
For the past fifteen years, Clarke has suffered from an elusive, debilitating illness.
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How Susanna Clarke’s fantasy worlds emerge from extreme solitude.BY LAURA MILLER
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBBIE LAWRENCE
W
riting a book is like moving into
an imaginary house. The author,
the sole inhabitant, wanders from room
to room, choosing the furnishings, cor-
recting imperfections, adding new wings.
Often, this space feels like a sanctuary.
But sometimes it is a ramshackle fixer-
upper that consumes time rather than
cash, or a claustrophobic haunted man-
sion whose intractable problems nearly
drive its creator mad. No one else can
truly enter this house until the book is
launched into the world, and once the
work is completed the author becomes
a kind of exile: the experience of living
there can only be remembered.
Certain books, particularly novels, in-
vite many readers to inhabit their realms
over and over again, and Susanna Clarke’s
début, “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Nor-
rell,” published in 2004, is one of those.
The novel, set in an alternative version
of England during the Regency period,
describes the partnership between two
magicians and how it degenerates into
rivalry. Executed in an exquisite pastiche
of the precise, ironical prose of Jane Aus-
ten, it reads less like a novel than like a
slice of an ongoing history; although the
book is more than eight hundred pages
long, it feels as if it were a mere frag-
ment of a fully imagined reality. Clarke,
who was born sixty years ago in Not-
tingham, began tinkering with the ideain 1992, while living in Bilbao and teach-
ing English, having abandoned a detec-
tive novel whose plot and crime she could
never quite settle on. In a recent conver-
sation, Clarke, who lives in a cottage in
Derbyshire, England, told me, of that
period, “I thought, I’m not going to do
this anymore. I’ve tried to be a writer, I
cannot do it.” Then for a few weeks she
came down with a mysterious illness that
left her too tired to do much of anything.
At the city’s English-language bookstore,
she bought a copy of “The Lord of the
Rings”—whose author, J. R. R. Tolkien,
whatever his differences from Austen,
had a similar ability to envelop his read-
ers in a fictional world. “That got me
through the illness,” she said. “I just read
and read and read the whole thing.”
Clarke decided to try her hand at fan-
tasy, specifically a story about English
magic, rooted in the English landscape.
To do this successfully, she felt, she needed
to return to Britain.
A decade later, “Jonathan Strange &
Mr. Norrell” was published, with a de-
gree of fanfare that startled Clarke and
her husband, Colin Greenland, a nov-
elist and a critic who, in 1981, received
one of the first doctorates awarded by
the University of Oxford for a thesis on
science fiction. The couple had suspected
that the novel’s appeal would be intense
but “niche,” Greenland told me: “We
thought, Maybe a hundred and fifty
people are going to read this, and love
it.” Instead, the book spent eleven weeks
on the New York Times best-seller list.
After Clarke did an eighteen-city pub-
licity tour in the U.S. in September, 2004,
her publisher asked her to return, three
months later, for a nine-city follow-up
tour. Greenland joined her both times.
The couple’s friend the novelist Neil
Gaiman—who calls Clarke his favorite
living fantasy writer and gave “Jonathan
Strange & Mr. Norrell” a prepublica-
tion blurb declaring it “unquestionably
the finest English novel of the fantas-
tic written in the last seventy years”—
advised them to mail their dirty laun-
dry home and, if necessary, buy new
clothes on the road. “You will not be in
a hotel long enough so that you can give
them your laundry in the morning and
get it back at night, because by night-
fall you will be in a different town,” he
told them. Book promotion was excit-
ing but, Clarke said, “physically quite