Episode
Susanna Clarke: 'You’ve got to play with things being very fantastical and also slightly humdrum'
- Podcast
- Fictionable
- Published
- May 23, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 1806
- Processing state
processed- Canonical source
- https://fictionable.world
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Summary
This spring we've heard from Fríða Ísberg, Bronia Flett, Jeremy Wikeley and PR Woods already. But we bring this series to a close with Susanna Clarke and her short story The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City. Clarke tells us that it's a story she's been thinking about for some time. "I have never really stopped thinking about Strange and Norrell," she says. "It's a world that keeps summoning me back." In the novel, The Raven King was very young when he first arrived in England, Clarke explains, "and I had an idea that he wasn't too happy. And also that he would be surrounded by politicians." Even though The King of the North is not a fairy himself, she continues, "his fairy upbringing has had a massive influence on him, and he's never really quite at home with human beings. He ends up in this middle space, not quite one thing and not quite another. And that's kind of useful to him, but it's also quite lonely." Clarke remembers learning at school that the Norman conquest was a wonderful thing, but it was actually a massive upheaval. "Nobody quite realised that of course it's being conquered by the French," she says. "And that, particularly for the north, was an absolutely traumatic thing." Just as in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Clarke found that exploring the differences between her human characters "made a little space to put the fairies in". "In a fantastical story, you've got to play with things being very fantastical and alien, and also try to make them slightly humdrum, so that they become believable." The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City is full of Clarkean weather, the "thick mist" around Durham, the rain falling across the New Castle on the Tyne in "grey, slanting lines", and the author confesses she feels at home in the rain.…