Susanna Clarke's Piranesi

We have waited sixteen years for Susanna Clarke to come back to us and tell us another tale, after the masterpiece that was Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell. Finally that time has arrived with the spellbinding Piranesi. Whereas JSMN was a doorstop of a book at nearly 800 pages (nor would I have subtracted a single word of it), Piranesi at 272 is just on the far side of a novella. Which is appropriate for a book that is almost more poem than prose.

In first person, a man describes his world, or rather his World, the House which shelters him, contains him, acts as a kind of sentient deity, providing him with his basic needs of food and shelter in its benevolence. Rarely, people come and vanish again, calling his House a labyrinth. The savvy reader understands in the narrator's description of the bounds (if bounds there are) of the house - the  endless stairwells, halls, vestibules, statues- the reference to his nickname of Piranesi, the artist who rendered fantastical architectural elements, perhaps most famously, prisons. 

(The savvy reader might also recognise here another iteration of Jonathan Strange's journeys into the endless staircases of the Otherlands). These rooms, these corridors, and the statues that decorate them act as his only friends, for his sometime companion "The Other" is clearly not as well-meaning as Piranesi perceives him, his residence, and its stone denizens to be.

 

Our Piranesi is an innocent stranded in a desert, shipwrecked but recalling nothing, or only trace elements, of a world left behind that he seems unaware of, except in vague references to things existing beyond the House: a garden, a university. Shipwrecked is the image that comes to mind for the base of the house seems built into the shifting sands of the sea. Tides come in and go out, benign or dangerous, depending.

Some readers, like myself, might be reminded of Venice's phenomenon of the acqua alta, in which the lagunary waters in tidal rhythms regularly flood the ground level of the Serenissima's structures. 

I think this is no accident. For one, Venice was the setting for her first novel's conclusion. It was, it seemed to me at the time, an odd choice for a book so deeply embedded into a collective English unconscious. And yet Venice is a kind of Otherland, half fish half fowl, neither entirely of one element or of the other, earth and water at once. It can seem, like Strange's Otherlands, to belong to another dimension  (this setting of the conclusion is prefigured when Arabella Strange visits Lady Pole and sees vedute of Venice decorating the walls- so the location cannot be chosen by chance).

This is all the more fitting for Piranesi -the historical artist was himself Venetian, for one thing. For another only Piranesi, the nicknamed character, can find his way around the this piranesian House invaded by the tides.  Others are lost. Art historian Paul Hills has shown in Venetian Colour how the double points of light in Venice, from the sun above and from the sun's reflected double of the  canals, produce a disorienting effect upon our ability to situate ourselves in space as compared to other more land-bound environments. Piranesi's House certainly does the same to those who come within its confines.

While I still hold out hope for a sequel to JSMN (women magicians and Childermass!) this tome pursues some of the same meditations on the power of the word, of madness and of memory and the nature of magic all entwined together, of the necromancy ipso facto practiced by scholars of the past.

We will relish losing ourselves, for however brief a spell, in the borgesian, mysterious and sublime maze of her words and images, this new Otherlands that is the House, and its genius loci Piranesi