Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Title: Piranesi
Author: Susanna Clarke
Published: 2020
Type: Fiction
Pages: 245
“May your Paths be safe, your Floors unbroken and may the House fill your eyes with Beauty.”
In Brief:
So good! A quick read, delightfully odd, excellently paced, with a fascinating premise and endearing characters.
Rating: 4.6
Synopsis:
Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.
There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.
Where I’m At:
This book was so much fun to read during the ongoing quarantine. I’ve really enjoyed books that have more fantastic elements to them, something entirely different to escape into – it’s almost a return to my YA days, when almost all the books I read involved some kind of magic.
We chose this book for my work’s fiction alliance, after we read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, also by Susanna Clarke, earlier this year. One of my main gripes with that book was just how long it was – even though I came to terms with it, I found that the plot dragged and was hard to get into towards the beginning. So I was delighted to see that Clarke’s new book was so slim, and I could enjoy her modern-day-Austen writing style and expansive imagination without having to slog through too many pages.
I love our fiction alliance. It emerged quite organically, yet I would say is one of our most successful “engagement initiatives.” The organization has a really siloed structure, so I really don’t interact much outside of the few people with whom I work directly. Given that I haven’t been to the office since March, I haven’t even seen the vast majority of my coworkers since then. Normally I’d be in the office every day and even see the remote employees once a quarter, for our Togetherness Weeks.
So our monthly meetings are just a really nice way to get together virtually and talk – not about work, not about the pandemic, not any of the typical, esoteric discussions we’re typically prone to as an organization. We can just nerd out over a work of fiction. And we sometimes share a bit about our lives along the way, see each other’s faces, and I feel a bit less alone.
Getting Into It:
I absolutely adored this book. It reminded me of Circe in the way that it was impossible to put down, totally engrossed and transported me into this delightfully imaginative world.
There’s an exploration throughout the book about the intersection of science, technology, and nature, which I thought way marvelously done. The Other and Piranesi both consider themselves scientists, Piranesi working on The Other’s behalf to unearth “strange new powers” for themselves from the House. Yet, while exploring the House, Piranesi has a sudden revelation:
I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery… The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of Itself, It is not a means to an end.
The Other wants to use the House for his own means; Piranesi merely wants to explore and respect its mysteries on its own merits. Furthermore, Piranesi is intimately connected to the House, knows all of its tides and corridors, whereas The Other stays in his own corner, sending Piranesi out to do his bidding elsewhere. Through this distinction and throughout the novel, Clarke nods to disenchantment theory, that in the pre-secular/pre-scientific times, humans had a different, more porous relationship with the universe and the forces that dwell in it. In this case, the House is the universe, and Piranesi understands and embraces it in a way that modern society has lost.
The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.
Clarke also creates remarkable characters, and the House is one of them. I’m groaning as I type this because I hate it when reviews describe the setting “almost like another character!” (especially if that setting is New York), but it’s undeniably true in this case. The House has mysteries, seems to have moods, and acts in its own way. It works, though, because of that reference disenchantment theory running through the book, a respect for the world on its own merits. It also gains some weight when you learn about Clarke’s own sickness that confined her to a bed, her own world confined to the indoors.
There are normal characters, too, who are fantastically done. The Other is deliciously evil, so easily and clearly bad – yet somehow he’s not entirely one-dimensional. He’s seriously flawed, but you can see his motivation, almost respect his ambition and cunning. As an ideal foil, Piranesi is perfectly pure, sweet, and cute – an earnest, wholesome puppy of a character. Yet there are layers there too, bound up in mystery and surprisingly sharp intelligence.
On top of that, Clarke’s writing is remarkable on its own merits. She has this utterly fresh, modern-day-Austen style that’s unlike anything I’ve ever read, clear-eyed and full of wit. She’s clever with her use of capitalization – Piranesi capitalizes most nouns, elevating them to the same level that one might give a proper name, making them more weighty. I wouldn’t expect to like this and it threw me off at first, but you get used to it as a reader, so that it ultimately just adds to the peculiar ambiance of her imagined world. She balances this with really lovely and vivid descriptions, such as this one of Piranesi’s first meeting with a human besides The Other:
He was an old man. His skin was dry and papery, and the veins were thick and clotted in his hands. His eyes were large, dark, and liquid, with magnificently hooded eyelids and arched eyebrows. His mouth was long and mobile, red and oddly wet. He wore a suit in a Prince of Wales check. He must have been thin for a long time because, although it was an old suit, it fitted him perfectly – which is to say it was wrinkled and saggy because the fabric was old and worn, not because the cut was wrong.
Really my only criticism of the book is that I found the ending a bit underwhelming. There’s so much mystery throughout the book, Clarke builds the tension and plot so tightly – she sprinkles in clues throughout, even alludes to The Magician’s Nephew – but the payout ends up being a little too neat, not as exciting as I would have liked. Still, I absolutely recommend it, because it’s overall such a delight, unlike anything I’ve read before.
