THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020 23
you, I would assume this book was writ-
ten by an elderly man.” He sold it to
Bloomsbury U.K. for an advance of three
hundred thousand pounds—before
Clarke had completed it. When I asked
her if she would have been able to finish
the novel without this combination of
encouragement and obligation, she re-
plied, “Possibly not.” She then added, “I
certainly find it difficult to believe that
I would have finished it without Colin.”
Early in “Piranesi,” the reader comes
to doubt the narrator’s understanding
of his situation. Despite Piranesi’s be-
lief that the House is the only world he
has ever known, and the only world that
exists, as he journeys from hall to hall
cataloguing the statues, and contem-
plating their significance, he easily rec-
ognizes and names the objects that they
depict—a beehive, a rosebush, a go-
rilla—even though these things do not
exist in the House. He admires and
trusts the Other, yet the reader soon
perceives that this trust is misplaced.
Piranesi spends almost all his time alone,
but he is happy in a way many modern
people might envy. The world that he
inhabits is, in his eyes, beautiful and
filled with meaning; the statues he stud-
ies and the animals he encounters, when
carefully interpreted, supply all the wis-
dom he needs to chart a proper course
forward. “The World feels Complete
and Whole,” he observes, writing in a
notebook supplied to him by the Other.
“And I, its Child, fit into it seamlessly.
Nowhere is there any disjuncture where
I ought to remember something but do
not, where I ought to understand some-
thing but do not.” Only someone able
to occupy a position outside the House
could perceive that there is much he
doesn’t understand, and even more that
he has forgotten.
Forgetting has been a persistent
theme in Clarke’s work. In “Mrs. Mabb,”
a story from “The Ladies of Grace
Adieu,” a collection that she published
in 2006, a young woman named Vene-
tia learns that her sweetheart has taken
up with the title character, a wealthy
widow, and has disappeared. Everyone
in town has a different idea about the
location of Mrs. Mabb’s house, includ-
ing some children who insist that it is
“at the bottom of Billy Little’s garden,”
behind “a great heap of cabbage leaves.”
Every time Venetia tries to follow peo-
ple’s directions, she is discovered hours
later, scratched up and wandering in a
lane or a churchyard, with no memory
of how she got there. Of course, Queen
Mab is a fairy described by Mercutio in
“Romeo and Juliet”—a tiny being who
tangles the manes of horses and infects
the minds of sleepers with tempting and
troubling dreams.
In “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Nor-
rell,” the bookish Mr. Norrell establishes
his reputation as “a practical magician”
by resurrecting the dead bride of Sir
Walter Pole, a Cabinet minister. He ac-
complishes this with the aid of a fairy
known only as “the gentleman with the
thistledown hair.” Like all fairies in
Clarke’s fiction, the gentleman is vain,
capricious, amoral, and dangerous, es-
pecially if you’re bargaining with him.
In exchange for assisting Mr. Norrell,
the gentleman claims half of Lady Pole’s
life, compelling her to spend every night
dancing at balls in his dreary castle.
These nocturnal exertions leave her
spent and joyless during the day. When-
ever she attempts to explain the cause
of her exhaustion to anybody, the words
coming out of her mouth instead tell
peculiar stories. And so the despairing
Lady Pole “sat, hour after hour, wrapped
in her shawl, neither moving nor speak-
ing,” as “bad dreams and shadows gath-
ered about her.”
When I noted the similarity between
Lady Pole’s affliction and Clarke’s, she
said, “Several people have pointed this
out to me—that, having written a long
book in which there was a nineteenth-
century illness, I then had a nineteenth-
century illness. Or that I wrote a longbook in which there was this sort of en-
chantment, and then fell into this strange
enchantment myself. It’s absolutely
right.” She joked, “You really shouldn’t
annoy fairies, or write about them—
they don’t like it very much.”F
antastic literature and folklore are
full of supernatural metaphors for
emotional states like depression, from
the Dementors of the Harry Potter
books to the Spectres of Philip Pull-
man’s “His Dark Materials” series, both
of which feed on human souls. The fact
that Clarke had an earlier experience
with extended fatigue, in Bilbao, makes
her depiction of Lady Pole’s plight seem
to be less of an uncanny coincidence.
But could Clarke’s episode in Spain
have been worse than she remembered?
It struck me that her recollection of
her more recent, lengthier illness is
not always quite correct. In 2006, I trav-
elled to Derbyshire to interview Clarke
for a book that I was researching, on
C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series. Accompa-
nied by Greenland, we went on a hike
over the region’s spectacular moorlands;
visited the gardens at Chatsworth
House, the seat of the Duke of Devon-
shire; and ate lunch at one of the cou-
ple’s favorite pubs. I had no inkling that
she was ill. Yet Clarke recalls this pe-
riod as one of unrelieved disability.
When I reminded her of all we’d done,
and of how healthy she’d looked to me
then, she was puzzled. After a pause,
she said, “In that case, I mustn’t have
been so bad earlier on.”
Illness can seem to bend time, and
it can warp memories, but when it’s not“We are doing something. You’re just not good at it.”