The beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.
I never read JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL – didn’t look like my sort of thing. But, given the attention paid to it, I was interested in reading Susanna Clarke’s prose. So I picked up the shorter PIRANESI, which looked more like my sort of thing, and then it sat on the digital pile for god knows how long. I opened it one Friday night, and finished it on the Wednesday night. I did not get much sleep. It is really very good.
Also very hard to talk about without serious spoilers, but let me try: there is a man who lives in The House, an apparently infinite arrangement of vast halls filled with giant statues, all constructed upon an ocean with occasionally dangerous tides that provides him seafood to live on, and subject to its own internal weather systems. This is the entire world. He has always lived in The House – however, he possesses education, objects and modern locutions that suggest this is not the case. He is visited twice a week by The Other, the only human he knows, who gives him tasks of observation and measurement in pursuit of The Great And Secret Knowledge. The Other calls our man Piranesi.
Piranesi is not mad. But he has been lied to. A lot.
It is a supernatural/science-fictional mystery novel, but it’s chiefly a study of solitude and empathy, and of living fully in a world full of marvels. (And, perhaps, the old saw about “where we get our ideas from.”) The mystery, by the way, is wonderful. But there’s an argument to be made that the book is really an allegory for how we live and how we don’t live, how we see and how we don’t see, and how the things done to us and taken away from us can sometimes lead to a new life that has its own wonders and joys.
PIRANESI, Susanna Clarke (shop)