About the Book
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.
Format: Paperback (245 pages) Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publication date: 15th September 2020 Genre: Fantasy, Mystery
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My Review
Piranesi was the book chosen for the October edition of BBC Radio 4’s Bookclub, hosted by broadcaster and author Jim Naughtie. I attended the recording of the programme on 25th September and joined an audience of readers to hear its author Susanna Clarke answer questions about the book. The programme will be transmitted on Sunday 6th October 2024 and is available after that on BBC Sounds (as are all previous episodes of the programme). My review is a combination of my own thoughts about the book and my recollections of the conversation that took place during the recording.
I’ll confess that for the first 80 or so pages of the book I felt completely lost, as if I was in some sort of labyrinth myself. I found myself wondering was Piranesi in an actual building? If so, how did he get there, and why? Perhaps it was all in his head and the House was some sort of analogy for mental illness? I think I was actually trying too hard to make sense of things and when I let myself go with the flow, as it were, I found myself drawn into this strange world the author has created. She admitted her favourite books as a child were C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series and one can see how this would have inspired her conception of the House. Susanna is also an admirer of the works of Jorge Luis Borges. If you’re looking for other intertextual links – as I often find myself doing – than the legend of the Minotaur is certainly one and I also found myself thinking of The Palace of Green Porcelain the Time Traveller discovers in H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine.
Piranesi, which he knows instinctively is not his real name but is the one given to him by the mysterious Other, has a childlike innocence. (The choice of the name Piranesi is no accident. Giovanni Battista Piranesi was an 18th century Italian architect who, amongst other things, produced a series of prints depicting fantastical subterranean prisons.) Where others might find the House forbidding, “our” Piranesi finds it a nurturing entity. It provides him with shelter and food – fish and shellfish – and seaweed which he dries and uses to create all manner of things. He spends his days exploring the various floors and vast halls that make up the House – some of which are derelict – and meticulously recording his findings in journals, his only means of recording the passing of time. Amongst the artefacts in the house are hundreds of statues depicting human figures and animals.
He believes himself to be alone in the House and one of only two living people in the world, the second being the man he knows as the Other. The Other arrives promptly every Tuesday and Thursday in the main vestibule of the House but never ventures any further in. Piranesi looks upon him as a kindly presence because of the useful things he sometimes brings him, such as a pair of shoes or a new supply of multivitamins. I don’t think I’ll be alone in regarding the Other’s intentions as distinctly sinister and manipulative.
Having initially struggled a bit with the fantasy element of the book, surprisingly I found myself regretting when it became more of a mystery as we gradually discover how and why Piranesi came to be in the House. Having said that, in Piranesi the author has created a character you won’t forget, and in the House, the sort of place you might encounter in your dreams.
In three words: Imaginative, fantastical, mysterious
Try something similar: The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
About the Author
Susanna Clarke’s debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was first published in more than 34 countries and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. It won British Book Awards Newcomer of the Year, the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award in 2005.
The Ladies of Grace Adieu, a collection of short stories, some set in the world of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, was published by Bloomsbury in 2006. Piranesi was a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, was shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year Award and the RSL Encore Award and won the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021. Susanna Clarke lives in Derbyshire. (Photo: Amazon author page)
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