A Review of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi

Piranesi, the title character of Susanna Clarke’s new novel, has appointed himself explorer and archivist of his world—an apparently endless labyrinth of stone halls lined with enigmatic statues. A vigorous sea sweeps through the lower level of the house; cloud, mist, and rain roam the upper level; stars shine through the windows at night. As far as Piranesi knows, he is the only living inhabitant of his world but for one: the Other, an academic who believes that the House holds a forgotten knowledge which can be used to unlock powers of flight, shape-shifting, and telepathy long lost to humankind.

Like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Clarke’s 2004 bestseller, Piranesi is a novel of enchanting world-building and detail, and a novel that is itself enchanted by the pursuits of knowledge-seeking and knowledge-sharing. Jonathan Strange layered speculative elements over a realist framework of Georgian social dynamics, emphasizing power relations and socially enforced silences. In Piranesi, Clarke has focused on a setting that reconfigures aspects of human experience and the natural world into abstract forms; a setting that recalls the parallel world on the other side of the rain to which the magicians of Jonathan Strange disappear.

Jonathan Strange is heavily footnoted, so that the novel itself could seem to be one of the volumes of magical history to which the narrator refers. Piranesi, too, is conceived as a found object, as if it has grown freely out of its own setting. The novel is structured as a series of journal entries, leaving the reader reliant upon Piranesi’s observations as a window into his world. Luckily, Piranesi is a generous observer and a meticulous notetaker: “As a scientist and an explorer,” he tells us, “I have a duty to bear witness to the Splendours of the World.” Clarke narrates so brilliantly through Piranesi as to turn his keen eye for detail and tendency toward pompousness into stylistic flourishes.

Piranesi’s frequent interrogatives make the text rich with a kind of loneliness more akin to wonder than to moodiness. “When I feel myself about to die, ought I to go and lie down with the People of the Alcove?” he writes, referring to a set of skeletons that he has discovered in the House, and to which he—like an acolyte—administers offerings of food, drink, and flowers. “What is a few days of feeling cold compared to a new albatross in the World?” he writes, as he sacrifices the dried seaweed that he burns to keep warm for a family of albatrosses that has made its home in his Halls. Piranesi’s narration is fascinated by the interconnectedness of things, and by Piranesi’s own place in the web of being that includes skeleton, albatross, statue, and sea.

The pages of the novel are studded with clever details and found objects, and part of the delight of wandering Piranesi’s Halls is in finding and listening to them. Listening to them because—though Piranesi is a distinctly quiet novel, punctuated by terse conversations between characters who tend to conceal as much as they share—every object that we discover in its pages is gorgeously in conversation with Piranesi’s universe. There are the pieces of torn-up notes found stashed in birds’ nests—evidence of a human mind in distress. There are the bottles of multivitamins and slices of Christmas cake that the Other occasionally offers to Piranesi, which suggest the existence of a world external to the House. There are the “seashells, coral beads, pearls, tiny pebbles and interesting fishbones” that Piranesi weaves into his own hair, physical manifestations his oneness with the House, which other characters would likely call his madness.

Piranesi is a thriller at times, with moments of fast-paced action and occult intrigue—but it is the interaction between Piranesi and his setting that makes the novel illuminating and memorable. Like one of Borges’ labyrinths, Clarke’s infinite house of statues is a meeting point between human consciousness and indifferent cosmos; between meaning-making and wild-beyond-meaning. As Piranesi and the Other navigate this liminal space, Clarke shows us different ways of thinking about knowledge and the natural world.

Piranesi identifies himself as an explorer and a scientist, but also as the “Beloved Child of the House”—because Piranesi’s way of knowing is also a way of loving, a way of receiving love. Piranesi’s ways of knowing are numerous: he explores the Halls by foot and notes the statues he encounters; he records patterns of star and sea, and so makes sense of the terrible tides; he talks to, and receives messages from, birds and statues. Clarke uses Piranesi as a model of knowing, and reminds us that there are areas of overlap between knowing and loving: Both ways of relating to the world can involve attentiveness and wonder.

Piranesi soon comes into conflict with the Other over the latter’s search for exploitable knowledge. Piranesi worries that this model of knowledge-seeking leads the seeker “to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted.” This objection to the Other’s motivations is not a denunciation of scientific pursuit (Piranesi, after all, is an avid mapper of stars and predictor of tides); instead, it is an intellectual cringing-away from the kind of science that views the universe as dumb stuff. To Piranesi, the universe is active—infinite in its beauty and kindness—and the worthwhile ways of knowing the universe are those which put him into greater harmony with it.

One of the few missed opportunities in Piranesi is the novel’s failure to locate its literary discussion of “madness” in relation to contemporary discourse about mental health or cognition. Clarke’s romantic treatment of madness (which is related to both childhood cognition and melancholy, and which opens the mind to magic) feels at home in the Georgian context of Jonathan Strange. It seems disappointing, though, that Clarke’s treatment of madness has not evolved in Piranesi: Though several characters are contemporary academics, discussions of Piranesi’s state of mind are conducted in the same, general, poetical terms as in Jonathan Strange.

Piranesi’s prolonged stay in the House, we learn, has caused him to suffer from memory loss and other side-effects. Piranesi, however, does not sense any disconnect between his consciousness and the totality of things. “The World feels Complete and Whole, and I, its Child, fit into it seamlessly,” he writes. “Nowhere is there any disjuncture where I ought to remember something but do not, where I ought to understand something but do not.” Piranesi’s state of mind (his memory loss, his dissociation from his former identity, his familial feelings toward birds and statues), which other characters call madness, seems to go hand-in-hand with his ability to understand the House.

Madness figures into Piranesi as a literary device, as it does in Jonathan Strange or the Romances of Chretien de Troyes. Given the cleverness with which the novel resolves some of the other puzzles of relation between the normal, human world and the House, it seems a shame that Clarke has not weighed in more explicitly regarding the extent to which Piranesi’s cognitive state might connect to something literal.

There are also moments of awkwardness toward the end of the novel, when the action between characters becomes the central focus of the narrative, and Piranesi’s relationship with the House seems to take a backseat. The narrative’s sudden insistence on straightening out Piranesi’s literal circumstances (on the Resolution of the Plot, as Piranesi might write) feels a rude awakening after we have been so happily immersed in the mysteries of the House, which ought to evade resolution.

Piranesi is a shapeshifting, dynamic creation that keeps the reader guessing as to what kind of thing, exactly, it is. It is a book about magic and alternate worlds, and also a book about science and learning. At the core of the novel is an abstract conflict that transcends human action; yet the pages are too saturated with Piranesi’s emotive consciousness to read as a straightforward, disinterested allegory. Gorgeously imagined and meticulously constructed, generous and sharp, it is one of those rare books that cuts through the heart of things but leaves that heart beating.