Book review: Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke
This is a mentally satisfying book without being so intellectual as to put everyone off. It contains random capitalisation, where any word (usually a noun) which appeals to the speaker is elevated to upper case. If there is a reason for this break with convention, I haven’t established it, although the reader’s mind stops registering it after a while as they buy into the engrossing story.
Piranesi is an enquiring young man who dwells in marbled halls. It doesn’t occur to him to live anywhere else because that is all he remembers, a generous architectural world of halls and staircases with only two people in it; himself and ‘the Other’. The labyrinthine structures Piranesi inhabits are surrounded by unruly waters, in turn the slaves of four tides, and when those tides converge it is a time of danger when many halls are flooded.
The first conclusion you should leap to is that Piranesi is living in his subconscious mind, particularly if you have read IQ84 by Haruki Murakami, in which the balance of probabilities favours this answer. However, the author of this book is Susanna Clarke and she delivered (in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell) a fantasy world accessible to sorcerers which exists just behind the reality we know. Is this more of the same, a fully realised bubble reality? Terry Pratchett did took the same path in Sorcery, where the hopelessly powerful (seventh son of a seventh son) character Coin creates a bubble universe for himself to exit into, from which he can’t do any damage to this one. Now that’s social responsibility.
Susanna Clarke’s previous work favours spells and witchcraft tools for moving past real world obstacles and opening up the cracks in reality far enough to squeeze through. In this story, magic-style incantations exists but, again as in Pratchett’s character Granny Weatherwax, most of this is window dressing to get your mind in the right place and the cleverest practitioners can adjust their minds to the right settings and just go there without all that dribbly candle wax and chanting.
There are a number of things in common between Piranesi’s home and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast castle (Titus Groan, Gormenghast, Titus Alone). Firstly they both have a number of rooms beyond the capability of humans to survey, mostly explorable but all in ancient disrepair and decay. Then, of course, there’s the flooding of the ancient halls (which happens once in Gormenghast, part two of the trilogy, cleansing the past and founding the new age and way of thinking). There’s an illustration of this in the Royal Academy of Art (The Flood, 1974, Charles W. Stewart) and, interestingly, Stewart was brought up along the same lines in his archaic home “”lit by oil lamps and candles … to a small child it seemed a giant’s castle… ghosts were largely taken for granted by the inhabitants.” In Peake’s version, the catastrophic inundation happens only once but mightily, its cause never explained, as the frothing waters climb the ancient staircase once walked by the duchess and her carpet of cats and insolently invade forgotten halls. In Clarke’s story, this natural force arrives regularly and predictable, so much so that the logical Piranesi has noted his observations and derived an accurate tide-table.
We’re in favourite subject territory here, but I’ve discussed in other reviews the origins of the ‘world behind this one’ in the belief system of our unlettered ancestors. The Celts, in particular, accepted that there was another reality on the other side of the mirror (which inspired Alice Through the Looking Glass [1871] by Lewis Carroll), the other side of the magical door (which inspired The Chronicles of Narnia [1950] by C.S. Lewis) or the door to another time, which is not a Celtic belief but derives from that tradition as it opens a portal to another world forever lost from our reality in time rather than in a closed dimension (The Time Machine [1895] by H.G. Wells; Doctor Who [1963-]). The Celts believed, rather poetically, that the shimmering surface of a lake or pond was also a transitional interface between the faerie world and this one, as commemorated by ‘The Lady of the Lake’ raising her hand from the water and casting the sword Excalibur at the feet of the deserving King Arthur (see Idylls of the King [1859–1885] by Tennyson and alternative versions by many authors). In the sediments of lakes in proximity to Celtic settlements we find a long record of archaeologists discovering offerings of coins, pots and unused weapons. Most commonly, the Celts sent iron objects as offerings to the world behind this one because iron was either a magical or (as Pratchett would have it) a magic-neutralising element.
Piranesi is a real person in this book, not a sprite, and so is everyone else. So, of none of them are elves, where did his alternate reality spring from? The story unfolds and adds information, allowing hypothesis to explain this bubble universe to be discounted. We can make sharp deductions from the clues, such as when Piranesi’s stand-offish companion ‘The Other’ only appears on two days of each week and has access to a supply of modern consumable items. It takes longer to understand how the bones of the dead got there, the biscuit box man and the folded-up child.
Forgetting is a theme of this book, where you might occupy a fantasy reality but it feels more comfortable than your experience of real life, so where is your incentive to ever leave (suggesting coma, drug induced hallucination, the land of the lotus eaters)? Is this labyrinth a place or a dependent habit to which he’s to accustomed to kick? Unlike perhaps the Terminator films, where our world of now has a connection allowing it to co-exist with another reality in the internal logic of that story, Piranesi in his vast and empty halls full of statues believes that the reality of the reader is the fantasy world, as he cannot comprehend an place with more than 75 people inhabiting it.
Although the story works perfectly well without knowing the following, the clue to Piranesi’s fantastical bubble is printed in headline text on the front cover: Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) was an Italian archaeologist, architect and artist. From 1745 he created 16 etchings of Carceri d’invenzione (imagined prisons) and then re-issued these in adjusted form in 1761, after which many henceforth included what were referred to as ‘impossible geometries’ (later popularised by Maurits C. Escher). In our historical reality, Piranesi was the creator of imagined worlds (unlike in the novel, where they pre-existed), possessor of an unusual and questing imagination that had a foundation in scientific method (just as in the novel) but that old Italian chose to move beyond the limitations of five dimensional mathematics, to annexe, expand and explore a sixth; the dimension at right-angles to this one. The Celts thought it was there. In mathematics, it is provably there. In the world of our eyes and ears it is not because it isn’t part of our experience. In a two dimensional world (a plane), a circle passing through it starts as a dot, lengthens into a line, decreases into a dot and then vanishes — thus the circle is always there but the plane-dweller never see it because the observer is missing the required dimension. Got it? If not, tough.
This place is by no means another lost valley like Shangri-La (Lost Horizon [1933] by James Hilton) because it has no religious element, no time dilation and isn’t a refugium for modern refugees to escape some terrible war. It isn’t a paradise either because ‘The House’ is unforgiving and, for the unprepared, presents open threats. The spirit of the place is never malevolent but can perhaps be seen as un-noticing and uncaring of human existence (as in ‘The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent’, from Sirens of Titan [1959] by Kurt Vonnegut). Piranesi has to fend for himself. The bones he assembles attest to the fates of those who don’t work out how.
The original Piranesi was a Renaissance man and our Piranesi is little more than a disciplined student. What our Piranesi does have though is perpetual wonder and likeability. He is a good person, trying his best and he is satisfied to be in this house of ennui and splendour that can never be fully understood. He chips away at the unknown, embarking on a multi-generational task, but the place takes the knowledge back by sapping his memories.
I can imagine that if I fell into this world and then escaped it, I would spend the rest of my days tortured and looking for a way back. This book is not Gormenghast but it is unforgettable in its own way.
