Maybe I’ve been reading too many short stories, thinking that every detail must count, must mean something later (in Strange, as long as that book was, details certainly meant a lot), but finally I came to grips with the fact that I could pretty much give up and skim past all the hall and statue descriptions. Where in Strange the world building happens gradually, here we are plunged into it, but instead of feeling immersed I felt distracted. In every entry, he orients himself by naming halls (ones he’s travelled through, ones where he fishes, where he sleeps, where he keeps his journals, where he meets the Other, where the Fifteen are located) and statues. I have explored the Drowned Halls where the Dark Waters are carpeted with white water lilies.įor me, the halls and the statues were a problem. I have climbed the Upper Halls where Clouds move in slow procession and Statues appear suddenly out of the Mists.
To this end I have travelled as far as the Nine-Hundred-and-Sixtieth Hall to the West, the Eight-Hundred-and-Ninetieth Hall to the North and the Seven-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eighth Hall to the South. I am determined to explore as much of the World as I can in my lifetime. Piranesi, on the other hand, starts with entries from Piranesi’s journals:ĮNTRY FOR THE SEVENTH DAY OF THE FIFTH MONTH IN THE YEAR THE ALBATROSS CAME TO THE SOUTH-WESTERN HALLS Strange starts in the real world, so Clarke doesn’t have to do a lot of world building.
I expected much the same with Piranesi, but I have to admit that for the first 50 pages I was…not bored, but ready to get on with the story. Norrell (which I’ll just refer to as Strange, from here on), I remember being immediately drawn into the book’s language and its world. Her descriptions of places and people are so straightforward that they both reveal the scene and allow the mind to dress it up a bit, as it likes. I think the “get to the action already” attitude is a modern one…something about the way Clarke tells the story makes it completely visible to the mind’s eye. Some reviewers seemed to think all the detail detracted from the action (Janet Maslin described it as “ action packed and unhurried”), and here I have to disagree. I want to refer back to some things I said on my blog about that novel because they’re relevant to my thoughts about Piranesi: A couple years ago, when I heard Susanna Clark had a new book being published, I knew I’d have to read it. Magic and fantasy are not typically my thing, but that book ended up knocking my socks off. I picked it up for a reading challenge–the prompt was a book longer than one you’d usually read–and also because I had been intrigued by the reviews. I read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell over a decade ago, before I kept any regular record on Goodreads.
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