Which Susanna Clarke Book Should You Read First?
Durham, 1110. A fairy host has swept across the North of England, the city is under siege, and its bishop has decided the sensible thing is to give up. That is the setup of The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City, a 96-page illustrated story by Susanna Clarke. Bloomsbury publishes it in the US on Tuesday, October 20, and in the UK on Thursday, October 22.
The bishop is a real man. Ranulf Flambard served William I and William II, became Bishop of Durham in 1099, and was the first prisoner ever held in the Tower of London, which he then escaped. Clarke sends him through uncooperative rivers and enchanted forests to the New Castle on the Tyne, to surrender to the newly crowned King of the North: a young boy who does not speak any English. Anyone who has read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell knows who that boy becomes.
We have not read the novella yet. Steven H Silver, who has, calls it "a puzzle story" and says knowledge of the earlier novel is not necessary to get lost in twelfth-century County Durham. Fair enough. But it lands right on top of the question every Clarke newcomer asks: where do you actually start?
The doorstop or the strange short one
There are two front doors. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004) ran 782 pages in its first US hardcover, carries 185 footnotes documenting an invented history of English magic, and follows two magicians reviving the craft during the Napoleonic Wars. Piranesi (2020) is 272 pages about a man who lives in an endless House of statues, clouds in its upper halls and a tidal sea in its lower ones. It won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2021, and it shares no plot with the first book.
Start with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Piranesi rewards arriving with nothing in your head, and it will wait for you. The big novel is the one the new book is talking to. In its invented history, John Uskglass, the Raven King, ruled Northern England from 1110, the very year the novella opens. Read the novella first and you meet a silent boy in a castle. Read it after, and you meet the figure two magicians spent 782 pages chasing.
If the page count genuinely puts you off, Piranesi is the kinder doorway, and its prize shelf proves you lose nothing in quality by taking it.
Is the show a shortcut?
The BBC's seven-part Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2015) was adapted by Peter Harness and directed by Toby Haynes, with Bertie Carvel and Eddie Marsan as the two magicians. It works as an on-ramp in one specific sense: seven hours tells you whether this world of dry English manners and dangerous fairies is for you. What a screen cannot carry is the footnotes, and they are where much of the book's mischief lives. Treat the series as a trial run, then read the novel anyway.
Our order
- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, with the 2015 series as an optional warm-up.
- The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories (2006), set in the same world. Its title story has Jonathan Strange discovering three women who practise magic in secret.
- The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City, out next week, read as a glimpse of where all that magic began.
- Piranesi, whenever you want Clarke at her strangest and most self-contained.
