Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke: Into the Library

Piranesi is the third book from Susanna Clarke. The first two were her monumental fantasy “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell” and its follow-up volume of short stories “The Ladies of Grace-Adieu”. Both took place in her alternate timeline of England during the Napoleonic Wars, except with magic. To a certain extent I was expecting, not the same world, but something on the level of JS&MN (782 pages long; it took ten years to write – and she has had about sixteen years – admittedly slowed by her work on a sequel to JS&MN and by ill health - to produce Piranesi). What I found is something on a much more human scale at 245 pages, but I do not judge quality by quantity. I read it in a single day, but that was because it was so good, I could not stop. It is both a fantasy and a compelling mystery.

 

          “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.” – Amazon.

 

          The House and its nature recall elements from other Fantasy classics. Perhaps the most obvious is the almost infinite Castle of Gormenghast with its labyrinthine corridors and eccentric nomenclature. But it also partakes of the timeless forgetful nature of the Wood Between the Worlds from the Narnia books; and there are two direct if well-camouflaged references to C. S. Lewis’s work elsewhere in the story. It seems to me to also recall the Neitherworld in Lev Grossman’s ‘Magician’ books, but that may simply be because of his own Narnian influence. I do not mention these similarities to complain of any intellectual piracy but to revel in the echoes of old themes built upon by new authors. Clarke’s invention is singular enough to claim it as a novel vintage.

The book itself is a beautiful item clothed in purple with gilded lines and black and white accents. The only flaw is that the front cover is slightly indented to show the edge of the ‘inside cover’, as it were, which is replete with blurbs. In my experience, covers like this tend to be problematic, as extra care is needed to shelve them to avoid damage. The front cover, after only one reading, is already showing a pronounced tendency to curl.

I think that the only other things that I have to note is that ‘Piranesi’ is a reference to Giovanni Batista Piranesi, an 18^th-Century Italian archaeologist, architect, and artist, famous for his etchings of Rome and of imaginary, fantastic prisons, and that the book won the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction.