A Christmas book for this old dog. There aren’t many modern books I would look forward to, as most of my favourite writers have died; Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was a great read and resonated curiously with my own preoccupations, 15 years ago (English magic). JS & Mr N is a strange beast indeed, a Fantasy work set in Georgian England during the Napoleonic wars, and written in very passable Jane Austen; I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who loves the Game of Thrones books, but it would also probably irritate those who sneer at anything lower than Henry James.

It also made a great, surprisingly unpozzed TV drama:

Her later & related short story collection, The Ladies of Grace Adieu, was surprisingly excellent, but Clarke is far from a prolific author and so I was astounded & pleased to hear of Piranesi. Where the Jonathan Strange world was, if you like, Fantasy filtered through Jane Austen, Piranesi is somewhat Borgesian but quite often reminded me of my own short stories –  although Clarke is a little older than me, we hail from a similar part of England and so perhaps there was something in the air. Piranesi is a curious meeting of genres – an allegorical fable at the beginning, later it became more concretely-grounded in an everyday, quasi-plausible reality, while never sinking to the mundane. As it opens, the main character is almost totally alone in a vast stone building of great halls & staircases, full of statues and floods. The lower halls are permanently underwater, and clouds form in the upper halls; fish and birds abound. The narrator, Piranesi, wanders these halls in his own routines & understanding; I say “his” but I was sure he was a she until his gender was specifically mentioned. He survives on fish soups; he avoids the floods; he takes care of skeletons he has found among the alcoves, regarding them as other people who just happen to be dead. As the novel progresses, he encounters others, strange visitors to his halls.

The prose is unflashy and pleasing:

In my mind are all the tides, their seasons, their ebbs and their flows. In my mind are all the halls, the endless procession of them, the intricate pathways. When this world becomes too much for me, when I grow tired of the noise and the dirt and the people, I close my eyes and I name a particular vestibule to myself; then I name a hall. I imagine I am walking the path from the vestibule to the hall. I note with precision the doors I must pass through, the rights and lefts that I must take, the statues on the walls that I must pass. 

As I began reading the book, I was alone in a vast stone building of great antiquity, free to wander the halls and staircases without a mask, for there were none to meet – not even ghosts, for the thousands who have died here, over the centuries, died at peace; there are statues but also bookshelves and paintings and sofas, a pingpong table, a kitchen, a stove; and, mercifully, no floods; and so the book had a special significance for me, constructing my own private rituals and order amidst a Piranesian world:

Il pozzo, tavola XIII dalle “Carceri d’invenzione” di Giovanni Battista Piranesi
(Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Roma – ANSA)