MacFarlane is obviously drawing on some of the ideas of Mark Fisher, who talks in his book, The Weird and the Eerie, about how “the weird is that which does not belong. The supernatural and paranormal have always been means of figuring powers that cannot otherwise find visible expression.” And he looks back to authors like Alan Garner and Susan Cooper, whose sense of the English countryside as riddled with the energies of history, helped form the childhood and likely the adulthood too of a more recent generation of writers and artists. Sebald, all of whom write about how the landscape is haunted not in any literal sense, but by “the turbulence of England in the era of late capitalism. Rather it is a realm that snags, bites and troubles.” MacFarlane looks forward to musicians such as P.J. Landscape, in James, is never a smooth surface or simple stage-set, there to offer picturesque consolations. James have lasted because James understands “landscape – and especially the English landscape – as constituted by uncanny forces, part-buried sufferings and contested ownerships. He argues that the creepy stories of M.R. In a 2015 essay, Robert MacFarlane recognizes or helps create a genre of work about the eerieness of the English landscape. It’s usefully read (as Clarke herself suggested in her contribution to the seminar we ran with her), as a book about the weirdness of the English landscape, and in a backhanded way about Piranesi too. Because it is so funny and charming, people tend to read it as whimsical, but beneath the whimsy lies the weird. Norrell is deeply beloved, as it damn well ought to be. The short version – Clarke’s first book, Jonathan Strange and Mr.
This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a few years, and the impending publication of Susanna Clarke’s new book, Piranesi, has finally prompted me to get off my arse and do it.
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