Children’s literature often portrays the world as alive, imbuing animals, objects, and landscapes with personality and intention. This can be seen in stories where bears wear hats and animals engage in human-like behavior, while even inanimate elements like sticks and scarecrows take on familial roles or seasonal duties. While many readers are encouraged to outgrow such fantasies, this sense of aliveness remains a powerful influence for some writers throughout their lives.
Author Susanna Clarke reflects this perspective in her work, which frequently explores the intersection of fantasy and the natural world. Early in her writing career, Clarke attempted to craft a conventional detective novel but found herself unable to suppress the vibrancy and nearly personified presence she perceived in landscapes, such as the dark fells near a Cumbrian lake. This tension led her to embrace fantasy as a genre better suited to capturing the mysterious life she sensed in the environment.
Clarke draws inspiration from the tradition of fantasy that ties creatures and characters deeply to their surroundings. She cites C.S. Lewis’s reflections on the Mourne Mountains, where the landscape evokes the presence of giants, and references works by Diana Wynne Jones and J.R.R. Tolkien, whose mythical inhabitants often embody the very regions they occupy—from dragons forming mountain ridges to elves inhabiting mystical woods. The relationship between landscape and its fantastical denizens raises enduring questions about whether the environment shapes its inhabitants or vice versa.
Her own recent work, The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City, features John Uskglass, the Raven King, a figure embodying the austere northern landscapes of County Durham where Clarke herself once lived. This character’s deliberate silence and inscrutability reflect the stark, expansive environs of his origin. Uskglass is a recurring figure in Clarke’s fiction, noted for his limited communication yet powerful presence, much like the commanding but reticent landscape he inhabits.
Clarke emphasizes the importance of preserving the imaginative vitality found in children’s literature and fantasy, warning against losing a sense of the natural world’s inherent life. In her view, modern society risks perceiving nature merely as an object to be exploited or conserved, rather than a living entity with its own worth. This viewpoint has gained urgency amid contemporary environmental crises that were not yet widely acknowledged when authors like Lewis wrote in earlier decades.
Fantasy literature, Clarke argues, serves to give the natural world a “face” and a “voice,” continuing a long tradition of personifying natural elements through spirits, fairies, and other liminal beings. These figures act as intermediaries between humanity and nature, suggesting a form of consciousness or personhood existing independently of human use or understanding. In The Bishop of Durham, such connections manifest in characters like Nicol the fairy, who envisions a dialogue between fairies and the natural world.
Natural phenomena—rain, wind, snow—are also depicted as agents of communication within Clarke’s narratives. The frequent presence of rain in her stories is not only atmospheric but symbolic of a dialogue between earth and sky, the natural world “talking to itself,” according to observations by editors familiar with her work.
Clarke’s approach resonates with the enduring ambiguity and mystery of fantasy, where encounters with the otherworldly hover at the edges of perception, “at any moment” and “over the next ridge,” but never fully manifest. This careful balance between the familiar and the unknown sustains the genre’s unique ability to explore both the richness of childhood imagination and deeper connections to the living world.
The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City is set for publication by Bloomsbury on October 22.