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Though we meet no actual fairies in Piranesi, it must be to their otherworldly realm that these souls have been banished. In fact, the House is not of this earth at all. This is not, in other words, the 19th-century Europe of Strange & Norrell (even if it, too, concerns a manly dyad). The House is all they know: its endless statue-strewn rooms and the pelagic waters that periodically flood them. Meaning the only two people in the entire world. As far as we can tell, Piranesi and the Other are the sole inhabitants of the House. Piranesi isn’t the narrator’s real name that’s only what his warder, known as the Other, calls him. Like the House, Borges’ labyrinths exist ab aeterno and are, for all practical purposes, the universe. One is made to think of Jorge Luis Borges, who must be Clarke’s fairy godfather. Fabulous and frightening, Piranesi calls it “the House” but also, at times, “the World”-“since the two are for all practical purposes identical,” he says. The Piranesi of Clarke’s new novel, its narrator and main character, is not an artist, but he is a man trapped in an infinite megastructure. Doors slammed in his mind and he went wandering off into rooms and hallways inside himself that he had not visited in years.” Instead, he journeys within: “He found that he no longer cared very much about magic.

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When Strange quaffs a safer titration of his crazy potion, he doesn’t crack up. If not quite a defense of madness, Strange & Norrell is an argument for at least a little more of it in the modern world. “In the fairy’s song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.” Here’s a writer who is at her most lucid precisely when she’s articulating the highest insanities.

“The world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands,” Clarke writes. There’s stuff in Strange & Norrell no normie could know, like the secret ingredient of regret-colored pigment (“the tears of spinsters of good family, who must live long lives of impeccable virtue and die without ever having had a day of true happiness”). The only possible conclusion is: Clarke is writing from experience. Whatever it takes, because Faerie is the wellspring of magic, magic which seems to have trickled out of England sometime in the 1500s. In Strange & Norrell, Clarke reports on the various ways an enterprising soul might make it to the fairy realm, which is located, difficultly, “behind the sky” and “on the other side of the rain.” Mirrors help, if you know the enchantment if you don’t, make friends with an evil fairy king who desires your soul. Clarke has indeed been there and back again. Clarke herself, in a rare interview, told The New Yorker, “You really shouldn’t annoy fairies, or write about them-they don’t like it very much.” Given that Clarke has now released a second dispatch from Faerie, called Piranesi, which plunges far deeper than Strange & Norrell ever did into those forbidden fortresses from which the un-mad and mortal among us are forever barred, perhaps there’s no better explanation.

“It was as though she’d been captured into the land of Faerie, as if she had been taken away from us,” Clarke’s editor told New York magazine. If this strikes you as cutesy, tidy, annoying, even a bit disturbing, a romanticization or fancification of what sounds like a period of immense torture for Clarke and her loved ones, consider their own words. The ways and reasons of the Fae are little known to common folk. Or else they meant to punish Clarke for her betrayal, for spilling their precious secrets, by enfuzzing her beautiful brain. The official story was debilitating mental illness-housebound, couldn’t write-but clearly her fairy patrons had come for her, to reclaim their erstwhile princess. After the publication, in 2006, of The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, a collection of fairy tales written around the same time, and in the same world, as Strange & Norrell, Clarke went poof. The events that followed only proved Clarke’s preternatural pedigree. You simply haven’t read your hidden history. That’s not how it happened, you say? Why, yes it is. It was as if she’d been there, to England, at the time of Napoleon, when those two infamous magicians, the bookworm Norrell and his perky pupil Strange, tapped into unearthly powers to impress politicians, move mountains, and defeat the French. Ten years in the making and 846 (footnoted!) pages long, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was ethnography, lore.

In 2004, Clarke published what can only be described as her first dispatch from the land of Faerie. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission.