![]() ![]() ![]() While it seems that no doubt The Magician’s Nephew is worth reading with Piranesi, it is actually Owen Barfield who seems to be the most important influence behind the new novel. Lothian notes the importance of The Magician’s Nephew for its ability to help her think about difficult questions of life. A quote from Uncle Andrew is also the epigraph to Piranesi, inviting us to think about the possible links between these two fantastic worlds.īecause I study literature and the spiritual life, someone recently sent me an interview with Susanna Clarke by Sarah Lothian of the Church Times. Rowling, and continues to fascinate readers and writers alike. This novel has been noted for its fantastic evocation by J.K. Lewis’ Narnian prequel, The Magician’s Nephew. I had heard that there is a significant connection to C.S. Norrell off the bookshelf now is because Clarke has recently published Piranesi, a dramatic fantasy experiment in fiction. But I am pleased to finally get to Strange & Norrell, which has been tempting me for years.īesides the desire for a SHANWAR 2021 read, part of my reason for pulling Jonathan Strange & Mr. True, I have needed supplementary physiotherapy to adjust for the weight of the tome. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is one of the books of the decade.Īnd I am enjoying it. Incredibly, it was longlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize less surprising, it won the 2005 Hugo Award for Best Novel, as well as the World Fantasy Award, the Locus, and the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Lit. I mean “weighty” in the literal, physical sense: I am finding this 1,000-page wonder, a book I did not believe could be written in this century, a difficult one to hold comfortably while reading in bed! But it is also weighty both in its material–a Regency-era fantasy presenting an alternative world not far off our own maps–and its impact. I’ve already read The Vanishing Half and Transcendent Kingdom.I have just begun reading Susanna Clarke’s weighty novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. I’m not aiming to read all sixteen books on the Women’s Prize longlist this year, but I’ve selected seven titles that I do want to read. Nevertheless, I completely welcome its presence here, and I hope this heralds more science fiction, horror and fantasy on future longlists, as well as all those genres that fall in between. Even when the Prize has branched out to embrace more speculative fiction, it’s tended to stay closer to realism. Piranesi is an odd book to find on the Women’s Prize longlist. The epigraph from The Magician’s Nephew, the only Narnia book I’ve ever enjoyed, is totally apt. As the plot gathers pace and the narrator starts to unpick things he believed were true, this aspect of the novel recedes, but there’s a haunting oddness about Piranesi that remains even when we return to a more mundane world at the end. He is greatly reverent of the dead, for example, able to pay each of the collections of bones he discovers individual attention, because there are so few people to remember. In the journal entries that make up the first couple of sections of this book, part of the fascination of the narrator’s character is figuring out how things might be if you thought such a place was the entire world. Only fifteen people, he believes, have ever existed, and only two of those are still alive himself, and a man he calls ‘the Other’, who visits him occasionally, only to disappear again ‘to far distant halls’. Our narrator tells us about the limited world within which he lives, a labyrinth of marble halls that ascend into the clouds and are intermittently washed by tides, and which are filled with statues. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure that we were ever really meant to know what was going on, for certain Piranesi has something of the resonant, deliberately frustrating quality of Nina Allan’s novels, perhaps especially The Silver Wind. It didn’t enchant me quite as much as I expected, but the world that Clarke creates within Piranesi’s House is so vivid and troubling that it will take me a long time to forget it. I think this sets up expectations for the book that mar the reading experience (encouraging the reader to rush to discover secrets), so I’m going to say straight off, I didn’t find any unexpected twists or shocks in Piranesi. Indeed, I felt like I knew what was going on almost from the start, although it gradually took firmer shape. Piranesi,Susanna Clarke’s second novel, has been called ‘ a puzzle‘and a ‘ mystery’with ‘ revelations‘ that unfold throughout the narrative.
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