It is subtitled ‘A Nightmare’ and there are many frightening moments - but the nightmare keeps dissolving into cheerfulness, companionship and beauty, which is not quite what you expect of a nightmare, and the other way round from a lot of books. That makes it sound like an adventure story - which it is, but it is also dreamlike, at times to the point of feverishness. It’s set in the late Victorian period and it’s about a poet who infiltrates the Council of Anarchists - anarchists being the terrorists of their day, the ones who hoped to overthrow society. The book I wish I’d written is G K Chesterton’s The Man who was Thursday. In fact I don’t really read it at all I just go and live in it for a while. I don’t read it like I would read other books. Yet in some ways the fact that I’ve been reading this book ever since I was a teenager, means that it’s a bit opaque to me. (Once an academic dared to suggest in his blog that Mr Woodhouse, Emma’s father, was a bad man and a bad father I immediately wrote an essay in the comments, explaining in great detail Why This Was Not True.) Many of the characters are kindly with an ordinary, everyday, human-sized kindness that isn’t particularly dramatic, but which brightens the other character’s lives. I love it so much that I gave Emma’s name - Emma Woodhouse - to the two female characters in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (or I very nearly did): Lady Pole’s Christian name is Emma, and Arabella Strange’s maiden name is Woodhope.Įmma is about a young woman who thinks she knows the secrets of everyone’s hearts and then it turns out she doesn’t even know the secrets of her own. I have no idea how many times I’ve read it. My favourite book is Emma by Jane Austen. My husband claims this is nonsense, but when we walk down the lane near our house if I don’t speak to the little cherry tree growing by the sycamore and offer it our good wishes, he sorts of shepherds me towards it and encourages me to talk. So I’m coming out as someone who believes that trees are people. But now that I am over 60 I’ve decided I can believe whatever I like.
Then I stopped believing it - because, you know, you are supposed to try to be grown up and rational. I’ve always liked the idea that trees were in some sense people and when I was a child I half believed it. Lewis had a little pagan in him, as do I I don’t find the two things to be contradictory. (They do later on.) Obviously C S Lewis is a Christian writer, but I think this is a passage that would appeal to a modern pagan. She is certain that the trees are going to wake up and speak to her, but they don’t quite and she has to wait. There’s a lovely bit where Lucy (my favourite character) wanders in a wood at night in the moonlight. It’s hard to choose one above the others - and it would depend on the day you asked me - but today I’m going to say Prince Caspian. My favourite books as a child were probably the Chronicles of Narnia by C S Lewis. The childhood book that’s stayed with you. I was astonished by all the parallels between the two, by details in the Borges’s story of which I’d no memory, but which resurfaced in Piranesi. I had vague memories of it and considered it one of the stories which had influenced Piranesi. After I had finished writing Piranesi I reread The House of Asterion, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges about a labyrinth.
Sometimes I don’t even need to remember them consciously. Very often these are stories I’ve read long ago. I build my fiction on the foundation of other stories I’ve read. That must help us understand each other - even if only a little. I think there is a great value in the way fiction allows you to become other people for a while, to see the world from their point of view.
I feel sure that books have moulded me and taught me all kinds of things - though these thing are so much a part of me now that it’s difficult to stand back and identify them. It never bothered me whether the main character in the book was female or male, I identifed with them regardless. I was particularly fond of historical novels and spent a lot of my childhood in the medieval period. Like a lot of bookish children I was always happier inside a story than I was in the real world. What impact have books have had on you as a person and an author? Susanna is the author of two other books, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories. This week, we're hearing from Susanna Clarke, who recently won the Women's Prize for Fiction 2021 with her novel, Piranesi.
PIRANESI SUSANNA CLARKE AMAZON SERIES
Welcome to The books that shaped me - a Good Housekeeping series in which authors talk us through the reads that stand out for them.
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