Piranesi by Susanna Clark
Review by Jess Moody
“Piranesi lives in the House. Perhaps he always has?”
As taglines go, it’s impressive. At first, unassuming. Then, the gnawing curiosity. That Capitalisation, the definite article of “House” – hmm. And that question. Who does it belong to? Why the uncertainty? If you like this kind of nuanced wondering – and, indeed, wandering – you’ll be in the perfect mind-set for this exquisitely-formed, delicately judged world in a book.
Though perhaps there’s no need for Bloomsbury to tease so. The sheer weight of Susanna Clarke’s first novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – in accolades, in ambition, in its mass of 800 pages – is surely gravity enough to pull back a generation of readers from 2004 (and perhaps not a few who just caught the more recent TV miniseries). The readers will find some familiar elements here: a scholarly tone and a critical engagement with the nature of knowledge; an older mentor and a young apprentice; a respect and intrigue for the non-human world. But this is not Strange & Norrell Part 2. This is a refocusing, a stillness, a moment in time.
Piranesi – but he knows that is not his name – lives in the House. Or rather, the House is his life, his world. Clouds roam the upper floors, the lower are flooded, lost. The maze of Halls run for kilometres, filled with rows upon rows of statues. Staircases are twenty-five metres high. The winds chill through collapsed floors. The floods, when they come, are ravaging, consuming; tides crashing through passageways and vestibules.
Here Piranesi gratefully lives his life as one of two people in the World. He meets the Other, of course, on Tuesdays and Fridays to help him with his Pursuit of Knowledge. The Other is not always amiable, sometimes distracted. But always very well-dressed. And Piranesi likes to be helpful.
For he is a scholar of sorts. The novel is, in fact, a journal: simply his carefully dated and indexed observations of daily life, his reflections on the Other’s pursuits. The gently pedantic observations and logical reasoning of the illogical is disarming, and an ingenious choice: for this is a novel that witnesses the limits, the transgressions, and the humanity of science. It questions what can be questioned, and reckons with the very great price of curiosity. Evidence and experiment sit side by side with faith and friendship in a personal exploration of trust and madness, method and memory.
The House is a place horrific for its familiarity. We know its forms – doors, windows, halls – and yet it is too vast, too infinite, too unexplained for us to feel at ease. It is what it contains: platonic shadows made marble, writhing out from the walls to grasp, trip, inspire. This is world-building of such care and craft, but more than that: for with Piranesi as our guide, these cold horrors are viewed with love and awe. Through his eyes and words, we see a benevolence.
But do we trust it?
With a plot of unfolding agendas, sacrifices, and egos, Clarke once more returns to the perils of creating heroes of our teachers. As Piranesi faces warnings from the Other of what is coming, when he must hide, and who never to listen to, the novel explores the pains of innocence and knowing – for our protagonist and in ourselves. For Clarke has dropped for us breadcrumbs of intertextuality – Narnian echoes, moments of Ancient Marinery – to play with our certainties. To the hierarchies of Academe as well, there is a mirthless reckoning, even a bibliography as story as if to say: we need only know the shape of your thoughts, to know you. Together, layered, placed in silhouette in this bare, bare house: references that create a unique tableau.
For Piranesi is its own beautiful thing. A coda, to Strange & Norrell? Perhaps. Certainly another nod to ancient knowledges grasped and grappled by those who cannot remain humble. But Piranesi is perfect in its solitude. Patient and dreadful, with a denouement so compassionately done. There is epic here in the world and the implications, but the characters are few, their personhood more precious for their isolation: walking, living, set at their own small scale against the endless Magnificence of the House.
You will put this comparatively slim, gently segmented volume down, close its pages with satisfaction. But the impact – the form left against the eyelids – of this modern classic will remain long after you leave. Against the incessant roar of tides in your ears: the last index of salt, and steps, and dark halls against starlight.
Careful. Do not lose your way.
Do not lose yourself.
Piranesi is published by Bloomsbury, 15th September 2020