THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020 21
stressful.” She added, “And I always feel
bad saying so, because I know that many
writers would love the experience I had.”
The publicity campaign was largely
over by Christmas. The following March,
Clarke and Greenland were dining at a
friend’s house during a holiday elsewhere
in Derbyshire when Clarke suddenly
announced that she needed to go home
and go to bed. “She stood up and stepped
away from her chair,” Greenland recalled.
“And, instead of walking around the
table, she just crumpled. She woke up,
and got a little bit further around the
room, and then collapsed again. I can
remember kneeling down with her on
the floor.” He’d never seen her faint be-
fore. Clarke has not been entirely well
since. “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,”
meanwhile, has continued to thrive: it
has sold more than four million copies
worldwide, and in 2015 it was adapted
into a miniseries by the BBC.
This month, Clarke is finally publish-
ing a second novel, “Piranesi.” For the
past fifteen years, she has suffered from
an elusive, debilitating illness—seem-
ingly, a vengeful return of the malady
that had briefly afflicted her in Bilbao.
She has been given various diagnoses,
including Lyme disease, Epstein-Barr
virus, and chronic fatigue syndrome.
Her most constant symptom has been
overwhelming exhaustion, joined at
times by migraines, brain fog, and pho-
tosensitivity, as well as by nausea, for
which she now takes medication daily.
At times, she said, bright sunshine has
felt “like an oppression, a weight lean-
ing on me”; she often retreats to a dark-
ened room. In the late two-thousands,
when her illness was at its worst, she
was unable to get out of bed, experienc-
ing depression, social anxiety, and ag-
oraphobia. During such episodes, she
sometimes thought of a favorite book
from her childhood, C. S. Lewis’s “The
Magician’s Nephew,” in which the con-
niving of a malign sorcerer leaves two
children stranded in the Wood Between
the Worlds—a grove of trees and small
pools, through which they can enter
other universes. The wood is, among
other things, a metaphor for a library.
One of the places the children visit is
the city of Charn, a landscape full of
grand palaces but devoid of people. “I
always liked Charn better than Lewis
liked Charn,” Clarke told me. In the
depths of her illness, she said, “I found
having people in the same street with
me quite difficult to deal with. Imagin-
ing that I was in Charn, that I was alone
in a place like that, endless buildings
but silent—I found that very calming.”
The similarity between Charn and
the setting of Clarke’s new novel will
occur to anyone who has read both books.
“Piranesi” is narrated by a man who
doesn’t remember his own name. He is
the inhabitant of what he calls the House:
an infinite multilevel succession of large
marble halls linked by vestibules and
stairways, and lined everywhere with
statues. The House’s lower halls are
sometimes flooded with seawater, and
the upper halls are filled with clouds that
shed rain. The middle level is the haunt
of birds with whom the narrator often
communes. He is unaware of any world
beyond the House, and believes that only
fifteen humans have ever lived, thirteen
of whom are dead. He lovingly tends to
the bones of the deceased, whom he can’t
recall ever knowing, bringing them offer-
ings of food and drink. He subsists on
fish, crustaceans, and seaweed, gathered
from the House’s submerged level. The
only living human being the narrator
knows is a well-dressed man he calls the
Other. The Other studies the House,
believing that it contains “a Great and
Secret Knowledge” that will bestow spe-
cial powers on its possessors, including
immortality, telepathy, and flight. At one
point, the Other nicknames the narra-
tor Piranesi—a joke that the narrator
does not get, because he does not know
that another world exists, let alone that
it once contained an eighteenth-century
Italian artist famed for a series of etch-
ings of magnificent, imaginary prisons.C
onfinement, a sensation lately and
keenly familiar to a large portion
of this world’s inhabitants, has long been
a fact of life for Clarke. She and I com-
municated through Zoom, and as we
peered at each other through playing-
card-size windows on our laptops—she
in a bronze-colored cardigan, and I with
a mass of uncut hair jammed into a
makeshift bun—she explained that the
overstuffed leather sofa she was sitting
on, with a de Chirico print on the wall
behind it, is where she spends much of
her day. The sofa was all I was able to
see of the cottage, a snug two-bedroomplace that Clarke and Greenland bought,
in 2006, as a getaway from their main
home, in Cambridge. Although they
have occasionally visited Cambridge
during the past five years, they have
spent most of that time at the cottage.
Greenland told me that they’ve found
the calm of the Derbyshire countryside
to be much easier on Clarke. He doesn’t
drive, though, so they subscribe to a
recipe-box service for meals, and neigh-
bors help out with the shopping.
Often while I spoke to Clarke I could
hear Greenland in the background,
clinking dishes in the kitchen sink. Later,
he told me that Clarke gets up much
earlier than he does, and tries to write
for the few hours when her energy is at
its peak. By the afternoon, she needs to
rest, and even in the morning her abil-
ity to participate in, say, a demanding
conversation is limited to about an hour.
She is very private about whatever she’s
working on; in fact, she can be a little
cagey about whether she’s working on
anything at all. “She’s on her sofa with
her laptop,” Greenland said. “And I don’t
know if she’s playing a game, if she’s
watching TV, if she’s writing e-mails,
or if she’s working. It’s not apparent to
me. She’s in her bubble. But what I do
know is that, for a long while, she was
too ill to write. And then, after that, she
was writing fragments.”
Many of these “bits,” as Clarke calls
them, have been squirrelled away for pos-
sible inclusion in some future work. “Jon-
athan Strange & Mr. Norrell” is partly
written in a style reminiscent of John
Aubrey, the British scholar best known
for his “Brief Lives” series of short biog-
raphies. In the novel, these passages come
complete with footnoted anecdotes that
document the history of English magic
with a distinctive combination of whimsy
and nineteenth-century punctiliousness.
One such story mentions a chick, hatched
from an enchanted egg, that “grew up
and later started a fire that destroyed most
of Grantham.” Clarke writes, “During
the conflagration it was observed bath-
ing itself in the flames. From this circum-
stance, it was presumed to be a phoenix.”
Although the origins of “Piranesi”
predate Clarke’s illness, she did not com-
mence intensive work on it until her
symptoms abated, a few years ago. When
she was living in London in her twen-
ties, after taking a night class on the