Piranesi lives in the House, spending his days exploring its labyrinth of halls and cataloguing its wonders: the many statues, the tides that roar up and down staircases, and the clouds that move in stately procession through the upper halls. The only other living being he interacts with (aside from the birds) is a man known only as “the Other”, who is striving to uncover the “Great and Secret Knowledge”, something humanity once possessed, that granted them awesome powers, but subsequently gave up. Then messages begin to appear – there is someone else in the House. Are they friend or foe? Piranesi is curious but the Other claims that they bring madness and destruction and must be destroyed. Lost texts must be found, secrets must be uncovered, and Piranesi’s world will never be the same.
Susanna Clarke’s debut Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which was longlisted for the Booker and Hugo award winning, was published all the way back in 2004. At first, Piranesi appears to be its opposite in every way: Jonathan Strange clocks in at just over 1000 pages, whereas Piranesi is a slim 272 pages; gone are the footnotes, the nineteenth century pastiche and omniscient narrator, in favour of a first-person narrator and the clear, precise prose of a scientifically minded journal. Whereas the scope of one was epic – spanning years, continents, and even worlds – the other is more intimate, even claustrophobic despite the enormity of the setting. But despite these aesthetic differences, they have more in common than would first appear.
Firstly, while the mode of the prose may be different, it still has the same gothic-tinged quality that makes it recognisably Clarke’s. Secondly, both are preoccupied with magic (the “Great and Secret Knowledge”), what happens to our world when it leaves and where it goes. In Jonathan Strange, Clarke presents magic as “the language of trees and rain and the stones of old cathedrals, of all the mundane things that made up the pastoral landscape of a forgotten English past.” In Piranesi, the strange labyrinth Piranesi himself inhabits is described as the rock hollowed out and shaped by the flow of magic over time, and, in both, wielding magic involves communing with natural forces.
The statues that fill the labyrinth with some small and some gargantuan, some pristine and others broken, while all possessing an unearthly beauty, they represent every idea, thought, and experience that’s ever existed; symbols that, like the bee, sword and key in Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea (whose underground story space bears some similarity to Piranesi’s labyrinth), or Lyra’s alethiometer, can be decoded on various levels of meaning. (There is a lot of classical imagery, from Minotaurs to the Faun that also graces the front cover, to Piranesi’s name itself, which is a reference to an Italian artist famous for painting fictitious labyrinths and prisons.)
There’s also a similar conflict over how magic should be used. The Other wants it to have power over others, and sees the House and everything in it as a means to an end, whereas Piranesi appreciates the beauty in everything, taking none of it for granted.
The book starts off rather slowly, as we only know what Piranesi knows, which, at the beginning, is practically nothing. But as Piranesi’s understanding increases, the plot unspools like a ball of yarn, gathering pace before culminating in a surprisingly suspenseful finale.
Similarities aside however, Piranesi is not just a retread of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It may be slim but, like an onion, it has many layers to peel back and explore. Clarke’s second novel is definitely worth the wait.
Piranesi is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of September 17th 2020.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
From the New York Times bestselling author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an intoxicating, hypnotic new novel set in a dreamlike alternative reality.
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.
For readers of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane and fans of Madeline Miller’s Circe, Piranesi introduces an astonishing new world, an infinite labyrinth, full of startling images and surreal beauty, haunted by the tides and the clouds.
