PIRANESI BY SUSANNA CLARKE REVIEW – A LABYRINTH OF KINDNESS AND HOPE

“Piranesi lives in the House. Perhaps he always has.”

Susanna Clarke is familiar to many readers for her sweeping, richly imaginative and detailed first novel Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Not only did Clarke conjure a magic and faerie fuelled vision of Napoleonic London, she also supported her creation with a fully-fledged back story, complete with regular invented footnotes.

Piranesi is instantly, constantly different. Here we find ourselves almost alone in a sprawling, endless, classical palace, where clouds fill the upper levels and salty seas swell through the lower halls providing fish to eat and seaweed to craft into all sorts of useful inventions. Led by our Clarke’s eponymous, journal writing protagonist, we move in.

The author’s gilded imagination is every bit as grand as in her first novel, but here the detail has been stripped away, much in the same way as the rolling tides of ‘the House’ smooth pebbles, and even at one point, bones. This may be a sparser world, where concepts and nouns only mean anything if there is a statue in one of the infinite halls to explain them, but it is no less compelling or haunting for that. The result is, if anything, to leave all the more space for wonder and questions.

And there are plenty of questions. The book teases us with them, as well as with the prospect of ancient wisdom, of treasures and puzzles and riddles. Who is Piranesi? What significance should we read into his historical namesake, the 18th century Italian architect famous for his fictitious prisons? Who is the Other, Piranesi’s only companion in the House? What or where or even how exactly is this expansive, crumbling, beautiful building. Could it be in some way representative of the place Clarke herself has spent the 16 years between publication of her two novels?

Perhaps more importantly, Piranesi invites us to consider whether those questions are important at all. Does the riddle lose its magic if we solve it? Does a puzzle cease to be puzzling once we plug in the final piece? As Piranesi himself writes in his journal:

“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 we ever 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 sight of the One-Hundred-and-Ninety-Second Western Hall in the Moonlight made me see how ridiculous that is. The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of itself. It is not the means to an end.”

As we explore the halls, there are Easter eggs galore to be had for literary collectors, none clearer than hints to the world of Narnia. Early in the novel, Piranesi tells us about his favourite statue, of a Faun meeting a young girl in the woods. Ketterley, the name of one of the book’s characters, is another nod, lifted as it is from the devious, manipulative, world finding Uncle Andrew of The Magician’s Nephew. Like C.S Lewis’ villain, we get the impression that Clarke’s Ketterley has singularly failed to understand the forces he has unleashed, and that, by the very act of inuring himself to the dangers of wondrous worlds, he shields himself from their beauty and knowledge. We have to risk heartbreak, perhaps even madness, to know love.

On the other hand, Piranesi, ‘the beloved child of the House’ whose whole soul is poured into its preservation, has no such mental barrier.

To Piranesi, his world is one of beauty, all its statues and alcoves and grand staircases sources of wonder. Slowly, with a scientist’s methodical record keeping but also with the tender heart of a romantic poet, Piranesi records his world, caring for the 13 dead bodies he has found in the House, watching over the birds and chronicling the rolling tides that occasionally flood parts of the House. The beauty is only dimmed , and the serene world transformed into one of danger, when messages and messengers begin to appear.

It seems cliché to point out that Piranesi might just be greatest embodiment of the old magic that the Other is looking vainly for. Nevertheless, it is important to do so, because this is Piranesi’s tale, and as lockdown compels more of us to spend longer in our own homes, longer wandering our own halls, we could do worse than take lessons from Collins’ protagonist and his profound and moving sense of wonder.

As we each grapple with our own meanings, wandering our own halls in the search for truth and purpose, and, in many people’s cases, working out how to deal with loneliness, we might remember Piranesi. We are valuable in and of ourselves. We are not the means to an end.