Piranesi by Susanna Clarke review – byzantine and beguiling

Piranesi lives in the House. He knows the House intimately, every one of its 7,678 Halls. He knows also the number of those who have ever existed: 15. Of these, Piranesi believes only himself and “the Other” are still alive. Piranesi is around 30, the Other almost twice his age. Piranesi knows the patterns of the tides that move through the House, sweeping everything before them, pouring over the statues and ornaments, rushing up staircases and across the House’s marble Halls and Vestibules. Piranesi is a book of imagined worlds and unpredictable capitalisations, of mystery and murder and university life.

For those of us who had been eagerly awaiting a new Susanna Clarke after 2004’s wildly enjoyable Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, it has been a fair old hiatus. I read that superb debut when my wife was pregnant with our son; now, as its successor is published, he is reading Jonathan Strange. Clarke has written powerfully of the illness that kept her from writing during the intervening years, often confining her to bed in the home she shares with her husband. This confinement seems to have provided one of the inspirations for the fantastical framework of Piranesi, where the eponymous hero finds himself exiled to a labyrinthine world, deprived of human contact apart from twice-weekly meetings with the Other.

That sense of isolation has gained a new relevance and timeliness with the coronavirus lockdowns, but what is interesting about the world of the House is that it is both prison and paradise for the (seemingly) straightforward and self-reliant Piranesi. He feeds himself by fishing and foraging for seaweed and has fashioned a form of religion in which he honours the 13 dead, whose relics are distributed throughout the Halls of the House. He loves his home (even though he has no memory of the world he inhabited previously): “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”

As we learn more about the convoluted explanation for the existence of this parallel realm, we understand it as a metaphor for the alternative universe that we all inhabit in our heads, but one that is particularly vivid and complex for those of a learned and academic bent. The byzantine intricacy of the House is a reflection of the fact that it represents a “Distributary World”, one that was “created by ideas flowing out of another world”. We are introduced to a renegade professor from the University of Manchester, Laurence Arne-Sayles, whose “great experiment” entails attempting to travel between worlds, happily sacrificing a number of his band of student acolytes in the process. As the book progresses, we move closer to unravelling its central mystery: who is Piranesi and how did he come to be trapped in the House?

This is a far shorter book than Jonathan Strange, but its many layers and complex metaphysics make for a reading experience that feels large in the mind. It reminded me repeatedly of one of the books that lit up my childhood – Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. It has the same vast imaginative reach, the same gothic intricacy, and it does the same thing of creating a world that feels none the less real for all its fantastical strangeness. Piranesi was worth waiting for: the most gloriously peculiar book I’ve read in years.