Piranesi
By Susanna Clarke
Bloomsbury, 2020

The characters in Susanna Clarke’s enormously popular 2004 debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell virtually all suffered in some way or other from an obnoxious surfeit of knowledge, and over the course of 800 pages they swapped notes and disputations on a canvas as broad as Europe. Clarke’s new novel, Piranesi, stands as a counterpart to these things and much more; the book is scarcely 200 pages long, its title character spends most of the novel inside the confines of one (admittedly marvelous) house, and although he meticulously keeps a journal, he is largely a stranger to himself and his world, and that world has few visitors, and those visitors are mysteries themselves. 

Both books are escapes and reflections, but Piranesi is a far more fitting sideways commentary on our current world, the perfect quarantine novel: confined to its home, always noticing new things, suspicious of visitors, fracturing on the edge of sanity. 

Piranesi himself is likable right from the start, his notes in his journal doubling as both a portrait of his winsome courage and an outline of this ironically vast world Clarke has created:

I am determined to explore as much of the World as I can in my lifetime. To this end I have travelled as far as the Nine-Hundred-and-Sixtieth Hall to the West, the Eight-Hundred-and-Ninetieth Hall to the North and the Seven-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eigth Hall to the South. I have climbed up to the Upper Halls where Clouds move in slow procession and Statues appear suddenly out of the Mists. I have explored the Drowned Halls where the Dark Waters are carpeted with white water lilies. I have seen the Derelict Halls of the East where Ceilings, Floors - sometimes even Walls! - have collapsed and the dimness is split by shafts of grey Light.

Survival, albeit of an estuarine kind, is possible in this house: there are cataracts of fresh water, and the booming tides that flood the lower Halls deposit mounds of seaweed that can be used as fuel during cold months. And there’s always something new to discover, particularly among the Statues mentioned above (be prepared, after finishing the book, to capitalize its key words reflexively for about a week), statues that take on a sheer variety that seems intended to exhaust the vocabulary of symbolism. 

Above all, Piranesi seems to like his home, even its unknown or slightly menacing aspects (the description of those tides in the lower Halls is never quite free of threat, for instance). “The Beautiful Orderliness of the House,” he reflects, “is what gives us Life.”

He isn’t alone in the place, and thereby enters the human drama of what would otherwise amount to the longest and most gorgeously-written Architectural Digest article in history. Piranesi is sometimes visited by a mysterious person called The Other, who tends to talk to him in the way of novelistic mysterious persons but who’s at least a bit of company. Piranesi records their encounters in his journal, but his rudimentary understanding of them is subverted by yet another visitor, The Prophet, who refers to The Other as Val Ketterley, a professional rival who’s never missed an opportunity to spread malicious gossip. Clarke pointedly introduces these flat notes from a decidedly non-fantastical world, and its startling how little they disrupt the fantasy at first. 

The Other has warned Piranesi yet a third stranger, The Sixteenth Person, is dangerous, but this only makes The Prophet smile at Ketterley’s egotism, and the whole development prompts Piranesi into an investigation that will end up forever changing his weird world.

The marvel of the book is that any of this works at all, much less that it all works so well. In its main lineaments and so many of its details, Piranesi looks like pure whimsy, which, however entertaining, is the betrayal of craft and the negation of drama. But with Clarke’s fiction there are always layers of complexity shifting tectonically against each other, and here the artifice around those conflicts is sharpened by being fabulized. The enchantment Clarke manages to sustain throughout these pages will leave even the canniest reader completely unprepared for the book’s stunning conclusion. It will leave them wondering, with a hard look of assessment, just how much time they themselves have been spending in Piranesi’s house. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.