Susanna Clarke is a member of the elite group of authors who don’t write enough. In 2004, the bestselling debut from a cookery book editor seemed to promise an unfailing fountain of the creative imagination: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, a three-volume reworking of Britain’s military tussle with Napoleon, but with added fairies, felt like Jane Austen brewed up with spells and a dash of the Brontës’ Angria sagas. A short story collection, The Ladies of Grace Adieu, set in the same eerie territory, followed, and since then — silence.
Piranesi is a publishing event, therefore. Austere and classical, it has no fairies but plenty of magic. The title character lives secluded in a mansion of dizzying perspectival queasiness. He has never reached its limits; with its uncountable series of enfilades, his adored ‘House’ is impossibly extensive, many kilometres long, periodically washed by tides and invaded by seabirds.
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