The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.
In 2020, when Susanna Clarke published her second novel, Piranesi, follow-up to her 2004 Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, many readers didn’t know how to react. It’s not what anyone expected. They also didn’t know how to review it; it’s so different from Clarke’s first novel that there are no stylistic matchups. Tough also because saying too much about the plot will destroy the mystery at its heart, the spell it casts, the deliberate pace and ratcheting tension that underlie the apparent chaos of the surface text in the early section.
After almost two years it’s still not easy to write about, because Piranesi evades easy characterization. It’s evocative but not reassuring, lovely but strange, and it’s not at all what it seems to be. And writing too much about the plot deprives readers of the joy of putting the whole thing together.
There are a few things we can establish quickly and without spoilers, though: its influences and references. First, the title, and the name given to the narrator by the only other inhabitant in his world, The Other: Piranesi. It’s a mocking and sardonic name, referring to Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 18th century Venetian artist who worked in Rome and was noted for his careful observational skills, his most famous work being16 surreal labyrinthine etchings collectively called “Imaginary Prisons.”
Piranesi doesn’t understand either the reference or the Other’s irony. Chronicling his adventures in a set of journals, he is less prisoner than inhabitant. He lives in a state of wonder in the place he calls the House, which is an apparently endless labyrinth of rooms, passages, vestibules, staircases, and halls, filled with statuary on at least three levels — one washed by the ocean tides and filled with fish and seaweed, one given to birds and clouds, and one habitable for people, if the House were occupied. Which it is not, except for Piranesi and occasionally the Other.
There being a labyrinth, you are inclined to think about Borges, and Theseus and Minotaurs, and neither of those allusions would be amiss. There are also references to C.S. Lewis’ Narnia and especially to Mr. Tumnus and The Magician’s Nephew, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Robinson Crusoe.
The Other has tasked Piranesi to search the House for secret knowledge and Piranesi, having no memory of where he came from, why he’s alone, or whether anything exists beyond the House, while he doubts the wisdom of such a task, is willing to oblige. He describes the House in his journals — the rooms, the statues, and everything else in the labyrinth that’s worthy of note — with precision, care and, yes, love. Love for the world he inhabits and the gifts it brings him.
The search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unraveled, 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 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.
Piranesi is anti-Strange and Norrell in its language and style. Instead of overflowing with words and casting its delicate spell through the accretion of detail and footnote, the style is spare, the narrator approaching his task with the precision of a scientist, or an academic. The novel unfolds in journal entries, beginning on the First Day of the Fifth Month in the Year the Albatross Came to the South-Western Halls, the day the three tides rose in the Third Northern Hall, through the Ninth Month of the same year.
It’s a slow wind-up, following Piranesi through, not just the House, but also the mystery behind the Other and the Other’s mission. The prose is remarkable — superficially simple but anything but. And our narrator? Our Robinson Crusoe, our Adam, our Piranesi? What to make of a man with uncommon intelligence but no memory, acute sensitivity and remarkable asceticism?
And where he lives — what is the House, anyway? Is it a metaphor? An alternate reality? A mad dream? It’s nothing quite so comforting as anything like that. As Piranesi says, it’s not a means to an end; it doesn’t exist for a purpose. It just is. A metaphor — well, what in literature is not metaphorical? It has a profound and abiding effect on our protagonist as he stalks knowledge through the marbled halls — knowledge not of the House, but of himself. The simplicity and mindfulness of his existence renders him the most remarkable of protagonists, and his fate: equally remarkable.
Reference: Clark, Susannah, Piranesi (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020).
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