24 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020
too crushing it can also create welcome
pockets of solitude, freeing an invalid
to roam through the halls of her imag-
ination, as Clarke appears to have done
in Bilbao, devouring Tolkien. Green-
land, who has suffered from severe
asthma and eczema since infancy, and
spent a lot of his early years in bed or
in the hospital, told me, “Susanna is
somebody who had to learn how to be
ill”—that is, how to conserve her en-
ergy and accept her limits. What can
seem like constraint can sometimes offer
up unexpected vistas. In 1885, Robert
Louis Stevenson, who also had a sickly
childhood, published a poem, “The
Land of Counterpane,” about the sto-
ries and adventures that he invented for
the toys arrayed on the bed where he
was confined, as he—“the giant great
and still”—overlooked it all. When I
suggested to Greenland that his own
boyhood hours alone in bed had made
him a reader, and by extension a writer,
he agreed. “I was always reading,” he
said. “That was where life was for me.
It was in books.”
Clarke’s most recent illness, however,
became so extreme that it offered no
creative benefit. Its nadir, Greenland re-
called, was “very, very dark—she was
very depressed, very, very angry, and alien-
ated from everything and everybody.”
She could not get out of bed or com-
municate with anyone, not even Green-
land: “It was just the opposite of the
woman that I’d met, who was so strong
and sharp and funny and bright.” While
she was infirm, he took care of the house
and handled her business affairs.
Although physicians sometimes char-
acterize constellations of symptoms sim-
ilar to Clarke’s as “post-viral,” she can
recall no viral infection prior to her col-
lapse in 2005, and it’s hard not to view
the hoopla and travel surrounding the
publication of “Jonathan Strange &
Mr. Norrell” as a precipitant. The pub-
licity tours appear to have upset a deli-
cate balance in Clarke, between the sol-
itude that fosters her writing and the
demands of a clamorous world that
was so delighted to receive it. Her ill-
ness, like a vengeful fairy, cast her into
a fallen version of Piranesi’s contented
seclusion—a poisoned loneliness where
she was swathed in bad dreams, shad-
ows, and suffering.
Clarke told me that several things
contributed to the eventual improve-
ment in her condition, making “Pira-
nesi” possible. At a private hospital in
Hemel Hempstead, she received such
alternative treatments as food supple-
ments, an all-organic diet, and a ver-
sion of homeopathy. She told me, “You’ll
see people saying, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t go
off on these alternative-medicine treat-
ments. You should stick to proper sci-
ence.’ ” But such critics failed to grasp
that “nobody was doing the science—it
was only the alternative people who
were offering anything at all.” She went
on, “It wasn’t like I had a choice. It was
either that or nothing.” In 2006, Clarke
found a progressive Anglican church in
Cambridge, and she felt spiritually at
home there in a way she never had amid
the disapproving Methodism of her
childhood. The Cambridge church was
a place, she told me, where “you wouldn’t
be judged for asking a question or for
saying, ‘I have these sorts of doubts.’ It
was a church that attracted people who’d
been quite damaged by other churches.”
Finally, in 2013, she visited the set of the
BBC adaptation of “Jonathan Strange &
Mr. Norrell.” She recalled, “I was a bit
taken aback by the way everybody treated
me as an author. I had got so used to
this idea of myself as an invalid, this
rather ill middle-aged woman. It was
quite amazing that they didn’t see me
that way.” For the first time in years, she
could imagine being an author again.T
he pandemic, which has winnowed
so many other lives, has expanded
Clarke’s. She’s taken avidly to Zoom,
and uses it to participate in online church
services. She’s begun writing short, witty
essays on spiritual topics for a church
newsletter. (“Jesus talked to lots of
women,” a recent piece notes. “It was
one of the things he did that worried
people.”) She can participate in inter-
views from her sofa, in increments of
time that do not exceed the limits of
her energy. And, because of the wide-
spread lockdowns, there are no demands
for a conventional publicity tour. Clarke
has begun work on a new novel—one
that she doesn’t mind talking about. It
will be set partly in Bradford. “It’s an
anti-horror novel,” she told me. Which
means? “Horror novels have this idea
that there’s a kind of secret at the center
of the world. And that secret is horrific.”This, Clarke observes, “isn’t much of a
secret, really.” Anyone can look around
at the world and see that. “So this would
be more about the fact that, at the cen-
ter of things, there’s a secret or mystery,
and it is joyful.”
“Piranesi” often feels like a book
about writing a book, the unending halls
a version of the boundless and unruly
possibility of a work that has yet to take
on the form it must adopt if it is ever
going to be accessible to other people.
Its narrator lives in a kind of dream that
obscures the truth about his past and
about his relationship to the Other.
Clarke told me that the environment
she created for her protagonist was al-
luring to her, too: “On the one hand,
people have died there, and it’s quite a
harsh and dangerous environment. But
with the statues, and this classical, or-
dered world, and these vistas going on
forever—like Piranesi, I find that quite
beautiful.” The House reflects her life-
long attraction to vast, grand, deserted
places like Lewis’s Charn. But as she
came closer to finishing the novel she
felt uneasy about the fact that she was
“contained in a shell of illness, almost
protected.” She explained, “Illness be-
comes a sort of protection against the
world after a while.” By finishing the
book, she said, “there was the danger
that that shell would crack, and I would
have to go out into the world.”
In the novel, an additional charac-
ter—a person whom Piranesi calls 16—
is required to coax him out of his state
of perpetual illusion. For much of the
narrative, 16 is unseen, a presence that
jostles the narrator to recall the unre-
membered life that he has left behind.
By the end of the book, the narrator
has decided that, among the statues in
the House, the one that most reminds
him of 16 is an androgynous figure
“walking forward, holding a lantern.”
Piranesi gets a sense “of a huge dark-
ness surrounding” this figure, and also
of solitude, “perhaps by choice or per-
haps because no one else was coura-
geous enough” to follow 16 into the
labyrinthine House, in an attempt to
reconnect its lone inhabitant with the
ordinary world. This plunge into the
unknown was, Piranesi now under-
stands, a “magnificent” act. The novel
ends a few pages later. Its dedication
reads “For Colin.”