Susanna Clarke

By coincidence, I happened to be reading Piranesi while I was also reading Plato, and to be reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell while also reading Jung, and I think in both cases this really helped me get the most out of these books. I suppose using Jung is pretty obvious, but I have not read anyone mentioning the comparison to Plato. I think especially there is an interesting relationship between the statues in Piranesi and the Platonic ideas. I don’t know if this was intentional, or if it’s more of a shared influence in the sense that anyone who is skilled at introspection and interested in analyzing the structure of reality and experience will eventually come to something along these lines.

It bothers me that many reviewers compare Clarke’s writing to Tolkien, and at best maybe Borges (because of Piranesi's apparent influences from The Library of Babel), but totally neglect to bring up, say, David Lynch. I think she is actually a quite underrated author, in the sense that there is an additional dimension—it might be called a kind of dream philosophy—to both of these books that a lot of people seem to totally miss, even if they like the Tolkien-esque folk mythology aspects.

(Alternative version:) These two books are both sort of a cross between Borges and Tolkien, although in different ways. Piranesi is more neat and explicitly philosophical, à la some of Borges’ stuff (it is presumably inspired in part by The Library of Babel). Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is at first glance basically a pastiche of The Lord of the Rings, although I think it has more to it than that. Both of these books have a kind of dream-like, mythological quality to them, and they also have a lot of (for lack of a better term) philosophical depth that is not immediately obvious.

Something that Clarke and Lynch have in common is that they are able to capture authentically what dreams feel like. Dreams are not bizarre, as such, while they are happening, they only seem bizarre in retrospect, because really non-dreaming is bizarre.¹ This is something that Flynn O’Brien also succeeds at with The Third Policeman.

(Alternative version:) If you like Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell for its peculiar kind of silly-but-serious dream mythology, and its parody of academic style (namely the footnotes), also check out The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien. This book, like Clarke’s books, has the quality that it feels like it almost makes perfect sense while you’re “in” it, which is something that most attempts to reproduce the feeling of dreams fail to capture.

1. The observation that Lynch is particularly good at authentically reproducing dreams, I think I got this from Death is Just Around the Corner, episode 268. ↩